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My website URL contains a #! (hashbang):

www.example.com/index.html
www.example.com/index.html#!

When user visit either two URLs above, the same content appears.

Does Google consider both URLs the same or is there a difference and could, as a result, a negative effect in organic traffic be observed?

unor
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Sanjay Negi
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1 Answers1

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Google understands that anchor links are the same page with or without the anchor.

Example: example.com/page and example.com/page#div

Google understands that these are the same pages. And so there is no duplicate content issues.

Anchor links are a very common and useful URL protocol across the web. It can be very helpful for example.com/kittens to link to example.com/animals#cats so that the user can navigate to the related cats content in that div. Linking to your content in this way should be perfectly fine.

Wikipedia links to anchors from different pages. And Wikipedia ranks very highly on Google.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Link#Linking_to_anchors

links to:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Section#Section_linking

Michael d
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  • Thanks for reply. I can understand no duplicate content issues but Please ensure me, these URLs will not divert traffic in two ways. www.example.com/index.html www.example.com/index.html#! – Sanjay Negi Mar 29 '18 at 12:58
  • It's possible that Google may send traffic to index.html#! if it thinks that the content in that div is relevant to the search terms. There are instances where Google will link users to a div on Wikipedia such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#Health - If there really is no reason for having links such as index#! then it's probably best if you don't link to your pages this way. Will it have some major negative SEO implication if you do? Probably not – Michael d Mar 29 '18 at 13:43