Are these URL hashtags an SEO issue?

[McTaggart]

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?

[TomRayner]

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.

[PeteC12]

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

[McTaggart]

Thanks Tom - that's incredibly helpful - much appreciated Luke