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:
No hashtags in the url @methode #Pubcon “that’s bad for search” pic.twitter.com/NHtqD2pZJO
— Trish Carey (@TrishCarey) October 17, 2018
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.
We don't index those separately, so if you're using them all for the same page, then that's totally fine :)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 17, 2018
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.
AFAIK most of those work fine -- at least, it's been quite some time since we deprecated it, so if there are issues, they would have come up long ago :)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 17, 2018
Forum discussion at Twitter.
