Is there a way to redirect URLs with a hash-bang (#!) format?

[DA2013]

Hi Moz,

I'm trying to redirect www.site.com/locations/#!city to www.site.com/locations/city. This seems difficult because anything after the hash character in the URL does not make it to the server thus cannot be parsed for rewriting.

Is there an SEO friendly way to implement these redirects?

Thanks for reading!

[KevinBudzynski]

I don't believe there is a SEO friendly way of doing this. It's possible to redirect using some JavaScript. However, not SEO friendly (as Matt Cutts puts it):

"For a while, we were scanning within JavaScript, and we were looking for links. Google has gotten smarter about JavaScript and can execute some JavaScript. I wouldn't say that we execute all JavaScript, so there are some conditions in which we don't execute JavaScript. Certainly there are some common, well-known JavaScript things like Google Analytics, which you wouldn't even want to execute because you wouldn't want to try to generate phantom visits from Googlebot into your Google Analytics".

[JarnoNijzing]

Perhaps you could try focussing on the exclamation mark (!).

That you use the HTACCESS file to rewrite the url with the exclamation mark to the url without?

Something like:

RewriteRule ^!(.*) http://www.site.com/locations/$1 [R=301,L]

The exact syntaxis for this statement should come close to this one. I'm not sure that this will work but it might work.

Regards
Jarno