[removed] with hash part (anchor) #

Question

One of our website has URL like this : example.oursite.com. We decided to move our site with an URL like this www.oursite.com/example. To do this,

Answer 1

I am fairly certain that the hash/page anchor/bookmark part of a URL is not indexed by search engines, and therefore has no effect on your page ranking. Doing a google search for "inurl:#" returns zero documents, so that backs up my assumption. Links from external sites will be indexed without the hash.

You are right in that the hash part isn't sent to the server, so as far as I am aware, there isn't a good way to be able to create a redirection url with the hash in it.

Because of this, it's up to the browser to correctly manage the hash during a redirect. Firefox 3.5 appears to do this successfully. If you append a hash to a URL that has a known redirect, you will see the URL change in the address bar to the new location, but the hash stays on there successfully.

Edit: In response to the comment below, if there isn't a hash sign in the external URL for the part you need, then it is entirely possible to rewrite the URL. An Apache rewrite rule would take care of it:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^exemple\.oursite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*)         http://www.oursite.com/exemple/$1 [L,R]

If you're not using Apache, then you'll have to look into the server docs for something similar.

Answer 2

I registered my account so I can't edit.

zombat : I'm sorry I made a mistake in my comment. The link to our video is exemple.oursite.com/#video_id=233. In this case, my rewrite rule in Apache doesn't work.

Nick Berardi: We changed the way our links work. We don't use # anymore, only for backward compatibility

Answer 3

Seeing as the server will never see the # (ruling out 301 Redirects) and Google has deprecated their AJAX Crawling scheme, it seems that a front-end solution is the only way!

How I did it:

 (function() {

    var redirects = [
        ['#!/about',         '/about'],
        ['#!/contact',       '/contact'],
        ['#!/page-x',        '/pageX']
    ]

    for (var i=0; i<redirects.length; i++) {
        if (window.location.hash == redirects[i][0]) {
           window.location.replace(redirects[i][1]);
        }
    }

 })();

I'm assuming that because Google crawlers do indeed execute Javascript, the new pages will be indexed properly.

I've put it in a <script> tag directly underneath the <title> tag, so that it get executed before any other JS/CSS. Note that this script should only be required for your index file.

Answer 4

When returning status 301, your server is supposed to return a 'Location:' header which points to the new location. In practice, the way this is implemented varies; some servers provide the full URL (netloc and path), some just provide the new path and expect the browser to look for that path on the original netloc. It sounds like your rewrite rule is stripping the path.

An easy way to see what the returned Location header is, in the python shell:

>>> import httplib
>>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection('exemple.oursite.com')
>>> conn.request('HEAD', '/')
>>> res = conn.getresponse()
>>> print res.getheader('location')

I'm afraid I don't know enough about mod_rewrite to tell you how to do the rewrite rule correctly, but this should give you an idea of what your server is actually telling clients to do.

Answer 5

Google has a special syntax for AJAX applications that is based on hash URLs: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html

Answer 6

Search engines do in fact care about hash tags, they frequently use them to highlight specific content on a page.

To the question, however, anchor locations are unfortunately not sent to the server as part of the HTTP request. If you want to redirect a user, you will need to do this in Javascript on the client side.

Good article: http://web.archive.org/web/20090508005814/http://www.mikeduncan.com/named-anchors-are-not-sent/