New AddThis URL Sharing

[BedeFahey]

So, AddThis just added a cool feature that attempts to track when people share URL's via cutting and pasting the address from the browser.

It appears to do so by adding a URL fragment on the end of the URL, hoping that the person sharing will cut and paste the entire thing. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me.

Unless I misunderstand, it seems like it will add a fragment to every URL (since it's trying to track all of 'em). Probably not a huge issue for the search engines when they crawl, as they'll, hopefully, discard the fragment, or discard the JS that appends the fragment.

But what about backlinks? Natural backlinks that someone might post to say, their blog, by doing exactly what AddThis is attempting to track - cutting and pasting the link.

What are people's thoughts on what will happen when this occurs, and the search engines crawl that link, fragment included?

[RyanKent]

This is nothing new to the web, just new to AddThis. TYNT.com offers this identical service. I have used them for some time but since I use AddThis for social sharing, it is more convenient for me to move this service to AddThis and eliminate one vendor.

The hashtag that is added to the end of URLs is there for tracking purposes. You can remove it or alter it, and you will still wind up on the exact same page. The hashtag has no effect on backlinks other then to track them.

[BedeFahey]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the response!

My interest isn't so much about visitors being able to follow the backlink or not, but how the SE's will index them. When a SE crawls a site with URL fragments, my experience has been that they do a good job discarding them.

What I'm seeing is two possibilities:

1. The SE's will discard the fragment when they crawl, and simply index the page as if it didn't have a fragment on the end, meaning a backlink with a fragment is identical to one without. Or,

2. They won't discard the fragment, and we'll end up with duplicates in the SERP's, which would, in part, be dealt with via a canonical tag.

It's great that you've used a similar service with TYNT.com Do you have any experience in how the SE's behave when crawling a link from TYNT and indexing that page?

Cheers.

[RyanKent]

The hash tags do not appear in the SERPs.

[RyanKent]

I was just watching a Matt Cutts video from 2007. Yes, I know that would be considered the dark ages of SEO but I believe for this topic, the video has relevancy.

@22 minutes in Matt says when Google encounters a hashtag in a URL they truncate it.

http://onemansblog.com/2007/08/04/matt-cutts-lecture-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/

[BedeFahey]

Seems like Rand concurred back in 2009:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

Useful stuff. About halfway down the comments on the above link Rand mentions needing specific analytics code to track things accurately. Anyone have experience with Google Analytics and # symbols?

By the way, Ryan, that link you posted is being flagged by Avast as containing malware. No idea if it's real or not.

[RyanKent]

I am not sure why you received the malware alert. Here is a direct link to the video on viddler: http://www.viddler.com/explore/jpozadzides/videos/2/

I can share that I used TYNT. Every page of my content had a hash tag on it and I never saw a search result with a hashtag. I never saw any indication in GWMT that my site used hashtags.

Matt clearly says "Google takes a URL and truncates at the hashmark. If you have bla-bla-bla #3 and bla-bla-bla #4 those both get treated or canonicalized as the same URL"

[BedeFahey]

Thanks, Ryan.