Thanks for your answer.  Yeah, I've seen the hash tag function as you've described it when being used for named anchors.  However, in my case, Google IS indexing the URLs that contain the #! and it is also grabbing my homepage's title and using it in the SERPs on those results.  So, given that that's happening, I'm concerned that the #! IS hurting me in this case.

In thinking more about this, I think what I'll do is put a canonical tag on the homepage and that should hopefully provide the extra guidance/insurance that I need to tell spiders that there is only ONE version of the homepage.

I inherited a site that used to be in Flash and used hashbang URLs (i.e.  www.example.com/#!page-name-here).  We're now off of Flash and have a "normal" URL structure that looks something like this:  www.example.com/page-name-here

Here's the problem:  Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index.  These URLs still work because the web server doesn't actually read anything that comes after the hash.  So, when the web server sees this URL  www.example.com/#!page-name-here, it basically renders this page www.example.com/# while keeping the full URL structure intact  (www.example.com/#!page-name-here).  Hopefully, that makes sense.  So, in Google you'll see this URL indexed (www.example.com/#!page-name-here), but if you click it you essentially are taken to our homepage content (even though the URL isn't exactly the canonical homepage URL...which s/b www.example.com/).

My big fear here is a duplicate content penalty for our homepage.  Essentially, I'm afraid that Google is seeing thousands of versions of our homepage.  Even though the hashbang URLs are different, the content (ie. title, meta descrip, page content) is exactly the same for all of them. Obviously, this is a typical SEO no-no.  And, I've recently seen the homepage drop like a rock for a search of our brand name which has ranked #1 for months.  Now, admittedly we've made a bunch of changes during this whole site migration, but this #! URL problem just bothers me. I think it could be a major cause of our homepage tanking for brand queries.

So, why not just 301 redirect all of the #! URLs?  Well, the server won't accept traditional 301s for the #! URLs because the # seems to screw everything up (server doesn't acknowledge what comes after the #).

I "think" our only option here is to try and add some 301 redirects via Javascript. Yeah, I know that spiders have a love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationship w/ Javascript, but I think that's our only resort.....unless, someone here has a better way?

If you've dealt with hashbang URLs before, I'd LOVE to hear your advice on how to deal w/ this issue.

Best,

-G