Does Google Index URLs Containing a Hashtag?

[marktraffic]

Hi there,

I am seeing lots of conflicting information about this on the web - some say Google do index this, some say that they don't. Hope I can find a conclusive answer here!

Generally hashtag URLs function like this: The hashtag essentially loads a different view of the code. The 'hidden' content within the other javascript tabs is always visible in the source code of the main page.

I can understand why Google would not index this as a unique page - all the same content is present on each, but loads a slightly different way.

However, in the example I am talking about, the site actually loads a totally new page but uses javascript to do so. So example.com/#!/page1 is totally different to example.com/#!/page2 - unlike the above example, none of the source for page 1 is visible when you load page 2.

Does anybody have experience and examples of hashtag URLs being indexed? I have lots of people saying they guess this and that, but nobody seems to have an actual report of this working.

Thanks,

Mark

[edited by: tedster at 9:10 pm (utc) on Jul 3, 2012]

[tedster]

You're not talking about any old hash tag here - it's a "hash bang" which is Google's own invention!This is the way they've created to code AJAX links to make them crawlable, which is exactly you have described. Google Reference [developers.google.com]

Many sites have had such URLs indexed properly on Google (including Twitter up until the end of May this year when they changed their technology.)

Hash tags without the bang [!] that are used the original way to indicate page fragment identifiers are also indexed, and sometimes inserted into Google's description snippet so people can go directly to the part of the page that meets their query.

The discussion continues here: [webmasterworld.com...]