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
-
Canonical Issue On AMP
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari
I have one issue about canonical. kindly guide me about it. I have a site example.com/abc and I convert it on an amp and know its URLs is example.com/abc=?amp. but the search console tells me to add the proper canonical URL but both pages are the same. kindly guide me about it. what will I do?0 -
Job Board SEO
Hello community, Should I be using canonical tags on every job posted on my job board and also every job category page? I currently use no canonicals on my job board but I still rank well organically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SO_UK1 -
A new website issue
Hello everybody,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtmaster
I have started a new website 22 days ago at the beginning of this month and i have long articles. I think this should make the site appear in search results for long tail keywords even if they are not very relevant but as you can see in the attached image from my webmaster tools the impression count has suddenly increased to 100 then significantly decreased again. Even when i cancel "filter" option. Is this normal for a 3 weeks old website? or there is something i have to check? thanks. cLMa04l.jpg0 -
SEO and former site
Hi, my client had a site built and hosted with Avvo but we now shut it down and are using a new server. My concern is that Avvo's internal link structure is causing SEO issues. For example, his site will list for "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", but is then removed for no reason. Far worse, while he had the AVVO site, it would never rank at all on Google. He's got great content, and no spammy links. This is the site: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any thoughts of what I could do to disavow the AVVO pages that Google still has indexed? Does it matter? Or, is it simply a function of time? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Zenfolio set up for SEO
We are using zenfolio as a hosted photography/image gallery set up as http://oursite.zenfolio.com We have about 24,000 backlinks to the website however over 22,000 are from zenfolio.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide
Do you see issues with this set up from an organic seo perspective and so many links from one domain pointing back into the main site?
Thanks0 -
Google tagged URL an overly-dynamic URL?
I'm reviewing my campaign, and spotted the overly-dynamic URL box showing a few links. Reviewing it, they are my Google Tagged URLs (utm_source, utm_medium_utm_campaign etc) I've turned some internal links to Google Tagged URLs but should these cause concern?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Two homepage urls
We have two different homepages for our website. One is designed for daytime users (i.e. businesses), whereas the second night version is designed with home consumers in mind. Is this hurting our SEO by having two homepage urls, instead of just building a strong presence around one? We have set up canonical meta on each one: On the night version: domain.com/indexnight.html we have a On the day version: domain.com/index.html we have a It seems to me that we should just choose one of them and set up a permanent 301 redirect from one to the other. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessieT0 -
Page URL Issue
Hey Friend, I am having sort of a problem. I currently have a subpage with the url of: /musclecars/ I also have a subpage at /muscle-cars/muscle-car-restoration.html Obviously my main url is not listed here. My problem is I am trying to rank for the term Muscle Cars but the first URL does not have the keywords seperated so I rank no where. If I type MuscleCars into google I rank though (but nobody types the keyword in like that). So my question is can I create muscle-cars.mydomainname.com and rank well with that? Or is it better to just use mydomainname.com/muscle-cars/ even though that second term I am ranking for already has that in its url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shandaman0