URL with a # but no ! being indexed

[EdelmanDigital]

Given that it contains a #, how come Google is able to index this URL?:

http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home

It was my understanding that Google can't handle # properly unless it's paired with a ! (hash fragment / bang).

site:http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home returns nothing, but:

site:http://www.rtl.nl/xl returns http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home in the result set

[onwebtoday]

tags are used to refer various sections of page to show up hiding the other contents, creating  a feel of "Menu" in Parallax Designs .

Using #  is referring internal sections of a within a page and NOT an url or a HTML / PHP file.

Since crawlers index only URLs these kind of menu's wont get indexed.

Google is capable of handling these property as site-links ( showing the most clicked # tags ) of the page.

Regards,

Raj

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The clue here is when you search for Google's cached version of the page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home

...which shows they associate this page with the higher directory (without the hash) or http://www.rtl.nl/xl/

Which is totally consistent with the way Google typically considers hashtags (not hashbangs #!). In other words, Google is ignoring everything after the hash for indexation purposes, but they are displaying it in search results. John Mueller of Google explained this on a very old webmaster forum:

"There are some cases where we're experimenting with showing them in the snippet (as in Colin's example), to help users to find parts of a page quicker."

So I think something like that is happening here. Google displays the URL for certain queries, but really it associates it with the higher level page, and doesn't really index/cache it as it's own separate page.

Hope this makes sense! Thanks for the great question.

[EdelmanDigital]

Thanks Cyrus, that makes a lot of sense - one of those strange intricacies!