Hash URLs

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Mozzers,

Happy Friday! I have a client that has created some really nice pages from their old content and we want to redirect the old ones to the new pages. The way the web developers have built these new pages is to use hashbang url's for example www.website.co.uk/product#newpage

My question is can I redirect urls to these kind of pages? Would it be using the .htaccess file to do it?

Thanks in advance,

Karl

[Schwaab]

Is the content technically on one page (ww.website.co.uk/product) and just being displays based on the anchor in the URL?

Has Google indexed the anchored URLs? In my experience Google does not index anchored URLs.

I'd love to see an example to see how it is coded; however, if they are just anchored URLs displaying content that is all located on one page, the products page, then the products page would be the only page you can redirect.  Technically, anchored URLs are not unique pages.

If the content is being generated with AJAX and your developers are using the hashbang method to serve a unique URL, I don't believe you would see the hash in the URL.

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Schwaab,

Thanks for the reply. Google hasn't cached the new pages.

For example, the old page is http://www.teapigs.co.uk/customer/pages/matcha/what-is-matcha and the new content sits on http://www.teapigs.co.uk/tea/matcha_shop with the different tabs. Are we going to have to make them actual pages with static URL's for them to be crawled and indexed? Got a feeling we will!

[Schwaab]

I misunderstood you before, I thought you meant the old URLs had the anchors.

You are correct, technically the tabs are not unique pages.  You would have to redirect each of the previous pages to http://www.teapigs.co.uk/tea/matcha_shop rather than to the anchored URL.

Having content under tabs may limit your ability to rank for a variety of keywords.  For example, if previously there was a page ranking for "What is Matcha?", it may now be difficult to rank for this term because there is no longer a unique page dedicated to the topic.  You lose the ability to have a unique URL, Title Tag, Meta Description, H1, and so on.

[KarlBantleman]

I thought that'd be the case! trying to get the developers to create unique pages and try and keep a similar/same design, not sure if it'll be too difficult though. Thanks for the advice though, fingers crossed we'll find a solution.

[Schwaab]

Good luck!

[ThompsonPaul]

Just wanted to clear up a bit of confusion. There is a difference between what can be redirected and what will be indexed by search engines.

It is absolutely possible to redirect the old URL to the new one that includes the local anchor (hash). In this way, user experience is preserved as for example, the old "what is matcha" page can be redirected directly to the new "what is matcha" tab, landing the user exactly where they expect to be. This is done in .htaccess as normal, but don't forget to escape the # symbol in the URL when you write the redirect.

But as Schwaab says, Google will index all the tabs' content as if they were all one page. If you look at the page source for any of those the tabbed pages, you'll see it's actually one primary page that includes separate sections for each tab - you can use GWT's Fetch as Googlebot to confirm this. So getting the main URL indexed means all the tabs' content are indexed, just not under separate URLs.

Having separate pages each targeting different but related matcha-related keywords can be beneficial, but so can having a single, longer-content, authoritative page with many more incoming links (as would be the case if the old separate pages were redirected to one primary page, consolidating all their separate link authority). That becomes a judgment call and is where the "art of SEO" come into play

Hope that helps?

Paul

P.S. Little quirk of local anchor URLs. If you're adding parameters to them such as Google Analytics tracking for incoming links, you need to add the hash after the parameters, or the local anchor won't work. e.g. mysite.com#localanchor becomes mysite.com?utmsource=foo&utm_medium=foo&utm_campaign=bar#localanchor