Does a # make my URLs duplicates?

[syktek]

Hi,

I have a 2 URLs on my site and I'm wondering if I'm hurting myself with rankings.

url 1: siteName/productName
url 2: siteName/productName#review

My first question is would the search engine consider this to be the same URL, not picking up from the # onwards?

Both URLs output different content based on how my system is running so to me the content isn't being duplicated. An SEO company that I've asked to evaluate my site is telling me that the spiders will see this as duplicate content and not index my pages. Is that possible?

Just to be clear productName loads a page with content about a product, when you click to review the page completely reloads (not using ajax) and the output in the main content area is now a review form.

[tedster]

Google does not index a # (including any characters that follow it) as a separate url.

productName loads a page with content about a product, when you click to review the page completely reloads (not using ajax) and the output in the main content area is now a review form.

To avoid all possible confusion, I'd consider using a meta robots tag with a value of "noindex" on the reloaded page.

[edited by: tedster at 5:38 am (utc) on July 11, 2008]

[syktek]

thanks very much for your reply tedster, i posted immaturely as i found my answer by doing a search!

[vincevincevince]

You need to rework your AJAX as much as possible, so that when there is no javascript support, you instead give links to real pages which have the different content.

One of the best ways to do that is as follows:

<a href="/real_review_page_3.html" onClick="javascript:return ajaxGetReview(3);">Reviews</a>

Returning false upon successful execution of the javascript function will cancel the navigation to /real_review_page_3.html for Javascript enabled browsers - whilst search engines and others (including the visually impaired who often disable Javascript) will contineue to /real_review_page_3.html and see the real content directly streamed to their browser.