Do Google and Bing crawlers treat hash tags in URLs as GET parameters?

Question

Crawlers in genereal consider http://server/page and http://server/page?parameter=1 two different URLs.

How do Google and Bing crawler consider hash tag URLs, such as http://server/page#hash?

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According to http://www.tynt.com/support/faq#technical everything after the hash tag is ignored. Are there other sources confirming this?

Answer 1

Your source is correct. Everything after the hash tag (aka URL fragment) is typically ignored. The reason being, the URL fragment is typically only used by the browser and doesn't cause additional information to be pulled from the server. So the content of the page should largely stay the same.

For instance, the hash parameter is typically used in 2 ways, either as a page anchor (think 'go to top of page') or as ways of passing information via javascript.

The exception to the rule is the AJAX crawlability implementation. In this case if you have a "hash-bang" (#!), Google and Bing (maybe) will attempt to crawl your AJAX content, which will treat your hash parameter values as separate pages.

Google => "Making AJAX Applications Crawlable"

Search Engine Land => Bing Now Supports Google’s Crawlable AJAX Standard?

Answer 2

This strictly depends on the concrete crawler implementation, there is no general rule enforcing any behavior.