Are these URL hashtags an SEO issue?
-
Hi guys - I'm looking at a website which uses hashtags to reveal the relevant content
So there's page intro text which stays the same... then you can click a button and the text below that changes
So this is www.blablabla.com/packages is the main page - and www.blablabla.com/packages#firstpackage reveals first package text on this page - www.blablabla.com/packages#secondpackage reveals second package text on this same page - and so on.
What's the best way to deal with this? My understanding is the URLs after # will not be indexed very easily/atall by Google - what is best practice in this situation?
-
Thanks Tom - that's incredibly helpful - much appreciated Luke
-
Hi,
Just a quick query regarding the "talk about Google will not longer index click to expand content". We use this method all over our newly designed eCommerce site and since our penalty removal , rankings have not improved as much as I had hoped so I was wondering if you had experienced a decrease in rankings on pages that use this ?
I will probably try and experiment a some pages on my site with the click to expand removed and all content showing but it does make the pages less attractive. Also I am not sure how long I would need keep the experiment going for to see a change or not in rankings?
thanks
Peter
-
Hi Luke
Those hashtags are internal anchors and they are quite commonplace and so Google handles them quite well.
What I would test would be how the search engines are crawling this page? What should be happening is that the search engine can see all of the text at all times. You can test this by entering the URL into the SEO Browser Tool - enter it there and click "simple" search (as it's free). What do you see? Does all of the page content show up? If so, Google will be able to see the page.
Now there are a couple of things to consider. There has been talk that Google will no longer index "click to expand" content. I've seen conflicting reports as to whether this has been implemented, but if it is on Google's radar it may be wise to avoid the tactic. From what I can gather, it looks like your page might be acting this way at the moment, in which case you may want to change that. If your website is using internal anchors (hashtags) to merely take the user from one section of the page to another (while never hiding the content) it would be fine.
Finally, if you're using Google Analytics, by default GA will register a new page visit each time a hashtag link is clicked. Similarly, it will not show you hashtags have been clicked and show them as visited URLs. So, for example, if someone visits www.example.com/page and clicks 3 hashtag links, that will register as 4 page views to www.example.com/page and nothing else.
However, you change that and here's a good guide on how to do so.
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO rank down 35%
So I recently switched from an Opencart website to a Magento 2 website and my rank has dropped by 35% two weeks later, this is bad news. My old Magento website was 5 years old and was in desperate need of an upgrade, hence the Magento 2 site. I realised today that the canonical URLs on my stores were set to the individual stores as opposed to one store, thus I expect resulting in duplicate content issues (even though Google Webmaster Tools didn't show it). I'm just wondering if anyone else can see something I may be missing? My sites are: thespacecollective.com (primary) thespacecollective.com/us/ (canonical to primary) Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
International SEO
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be www.mysite.co.uk (current site) www.mysite.com (new intended site) www.mysite.com.au (new intended site) and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites. Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
Am I missing an issue on my website?
Are there any glaring issues that I am missing with my site? I am building links, and growing the profile but had seen a drop in rankings a couple of months ago. Is this do to a site issue or am I just missing something? www.wallybuysell.com Any help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CKerr0 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Is this Negative SEO?
Hello Everyone, I have just spent the past 9 months designing, engineering, and manufacturing our first product. We just opened our web store and started selling product. http://miveu.com. I have spent zero time doing any kind of SEO. We haven't even put up a sitemap yet or any redirects. I'm just now starting to take a look at things. As soon as I start digging, I find that it appears that someone is at least attempting to do some kind of negative SEO against us. It seems to have started about a month ago. Check this out. https://www.google.com/search?q=miveu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-beta#q=miveu&hl=en&client=firefox-beta&hs=bo2&tbo=1&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:d&sa=X&psj=1&ei=AGgBUJfJNK650QHW8YW-Bw&ved=0CE0QpwUoAg&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=335379d2f3ac2208&biw=993&bih=637 At first I was thinking this isn't so good, but it seems they are just trying to build crap content about our keywords and make it relevant to us. After taking a closer look, I'm thinking maybe this isn't all bad. They have targeted all of our exiting YouTube videos and created new videos that use all of our keywords, titles, people, etc in an effort to make our existing videos irrelevant. They have have also done the same thing with articles that were written about us, awards we have won as well as started negative campaigns about us and people who have said good things about us. Here are my thoughts. While the content is really crappy, it seems like they are actually building keyword relevance to us and our products. They have all the right keywords, the content is just crappy. "There is no such thing as bad press". I don't know if anyone has ever said this before, but I'm going to refer to their effort as "White-Hate SEO" because it doesn't appear to be a real dark effort. Am I missing something here, am I way off base? My bigger worry is that their campaign may include some much darker efforts that I just haven't found yet. I'm pretty sure I know who is responsible for this. They have made it clear that they really do hate us. Frankly, I'm not interested in retaliation, I just want to get my own house in order with some good old-school whit-hat SEO. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dmac
David0 -
URL - Keywords
My domain name contains my top two keywords. Am I penalized if I create another page where I add my domain key words a 2nd time after the domain name along with a subcategory and the name of a state. I don't know what white hat and black hat is so I want to make sure I stay white hat. Also I didn't know it but is it true that your title shows up in your domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
E-Commerce SEO
Dear SeoMoz fans, I'm really glad to be a part of the community. Just have a quick question. I run a marketplace similar to eBay where users sell the products. I would like some suggestions on how to effectively proceed with SEO for an ecommerce marketplace of this type. Should I be proceed developing product review or product comparison landing pages and build links towards them as often suggested or should I consider alternative marketing methods? Looking forward to your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | buzzmartseo0