#! (hashbang) and Google SEO

Question

I've read over the Google specification for crawling AJAX-enabled pages. Since part of Google's indexing method uses the URL itself, will converting to !# negatively effect SEO?

For instance, if I have a page at www.mysite.com/surfing, Google will be likely to rate it highly if a user searches for "surfing" because it has "surfing" in the URL. Would the same be true for www.mysite.com/#!surfing or does it ignore the hash fragments for the purposes of weighting the URL itself?

Answer 1

Perhaps you have already read in the google Ajax-crawling instructions that the !# is actually transformed into ?_escaped_fragment_ by the google crawler. So let's use your example: www.mysite.com/#!surfing , the google crawler will see the link as www.mysite.com/?_escaped_fragment_=surfing . So it comes to the question : what is better for google SEO a link with a paremeter ?_escaped_fragment_=surfing or without one /surfing ? Search engineer representatives have confirmed on numerous occasions that URLs with more than 2 dynamic parameters may not be spidered unless they are perceived as significantly important (i.e. have many, many links pointing to them). So unless you're using too many parameters in the url, you don't have much to worry about. If you haven't done it already, you can always read the detailed google documentation https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started . Now, just an advice - don't rely on # in your AJAX website. Use history.pushState() to change your url to whatever you wish. I use #! only on browsers that don't support history.pushState() like IE. The problem with the SEO with #! doesn't come form the url but from the difficulties in the Server Side processing of the information needed to provide HTML snapshot for the crawler.