Google: Do Not Use Hashtags In URLs

Oct 18, 2018 - 7:23 am 7 by

Google Hashtag

You know I just reported yesterday that Google's John Mueller confirmed that the AJAX crawling scheme has really been deprecated. The same day, Gary Illyes from Google in one of his slides at PubCon said "no # in URLs" and said on stage "do not use hashtags in URLs."

Here are the slides:

Now, Gary was specifically talking about using hashtags where the # calls new content to load. If you are just using them as basic web anchors to scroll down the page or to a location in the page but that content has already been loaded on first load - then it is fine. But if you programmed your site to load new content based on what comes up after the # sign in the URL, then you are in trouble.

John confirmed basic anchors are fine, i.e. a href="#anchor" is fine.

John also confirmed that most Wix sites are fine since Google deprecated the AJAX crawling scheme a while back and they have not had issues recently.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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