# in url affecting rank

[sicseo]

Hi

I am building links to a page www.companyname.com/category.index.php

There is also another similar url www.companyname.com/category.index.php#. This page is linked to from the non # page. This is a new client and I'm not entirely sure why that link is there.

Am I correct in thinking that these two urls are different in the eyes of the search engines?

If so, would some of the link juice to www.companyname.com/category.index.php

be transferred to

www.companyname.com/category.index.php#

and affect the ranking of the non # page?

I hope this makes sense!

Thanks

[danrawk]

the hash "#" is sometimes used as a link reference to a specific spot on a linked page

i.e.  www.companyname.com/category.index.php#specificspot

do you have access to google webmaster tools? in there, you should see a section about duplicate content that google is seeing. that might be of some help to you.

if by chance the # is not used in the way mentioned above, and it's some weird content management system character to manage pages, you may want to implement canonical tagging so that when someone views

www.companyname.com/category.index.php#

the canonical reference is for :

www.companyname.com/category.index

[sicseo]

Many thanks for your answer danrawk.

I think the # has been left from when the website was being developed and was used as a placeholder for where the intended url should go.

I'm not seeing any duplicate content issues in Webmaster Tools. Would this mean Google doesn't see this as two different urls?

If it does see two different urls, I guess we will have to use canonical tag.

Thanks

[Mike.Goracke]

The hash or "#" is usually just referenced by the browser, not the server, so Google does no care about the use of a "#" at the end of your URL. In fact, you can go to pretty much any page and add "#" at the end and you will get the same page, because it is a browser reference.

Some web designers will also just put "#" as the URL as they are coding, because they do not know the final URL.

If you can pinpoint where this is happening, I would suggest fixing it, even if it is not impacting Google indexing or your SEO... just from a "good house keeping" point of view.

You would use the canonical tag if you wanted to keep both versions in place. If you only want to keep one version, you would 301 redirect, which come to think of it... I don't know if you can do, again because the hash is usually just reference by the browser and not the server.

Here is also a quick quote from John Mu (an engineer at Google), stating, "We generally ignore the "fragments" (as in http://domain.com/path#fragment) when crawling, indexing and ranking since this is generally just something that is handled on the client side."

If you provide the domain, I might be able to help you further.

Hope this info helps.

Mike

[sicseo]

That's great Mike, thanks for your help.

I'm pretty confident it's not a duplicate page now, although we do need to link to the correct page, simply from a user experience point of view.

Cheers.

[FonSeo]

I had similar question, but I found this discussion so won’t send my questions as a new one.

My questions was that is it a SEO (link juice) problem when we did 301 redirects from http://www.example.com/folder to http://www.anotherdomain.com/folder/#rdr=oldsite
We added the hash / parameter to get stats how many visits do we get from the old site now and in the future, and with the help of hash in url we can get this information from our analytics tool.

After reading Mike’s answer, I believe I found my answer and understand that this is not a problem, but if anyone have other comments then please respond. Thanks!