Number Sign "#" And Search Engines, How will search engines treat a "#"? Options

[niemi]

Hi

Does these two URL's work equally well for search engines?

http://niceurl.com/#wheelchairs

http://niceurl.com/wheelchairs

Or do search engines have a hard time dealing with number signs / hashes / #'s ?

[JohnMu]

Hi Niemi
Search engines generally ignore everything after the # . One of the reasons is (probably) that the information after the # is not sent to the server when a request is made. For example, when the user accesses "niceurl.com/#marker", the browser gets "niceurl.com/" and then tries to find the anchor ("#marker") on the client side. In general that is not a problem since search engines take a look at the pages as a whole -- however if you are using them in combination with AJAX to display different content, the search engines will not be able to recognize that (as it is in general with content displayed / created through AJAX).

If you are using AJAX, you might want to take a look at a blog post we did: A spider's view of Web 2.0, it refers to Hijax, a technique to combine the two versions of the URLs.

John