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URL with anchor listed in Webmaster Console Performance report

         

Broadway

9:43 pm on Aug 7, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I'm working with Webmaster Console in the "Performance" section.
I've clicked the "Pages" option.

When the Console page has reformatted to show a listing of my website's URL's, I notice that some of them are included more than once:
https://www.example.com/page1.html
https://www.example.com/page1.html#cars
https://www.example.com/page1.html#boats
https://www.example.com/page1.html#trains

All of these are valid anchors. Probably in lists or menus I have links in my html that point to these destinations.

In the Performance report, each of the URL's that have an included anchor have statistics associated with them (impressions, clicks, average position, etc...) just like they were their own individual page.

As best as I can tell, some of the first ones started showing up in the Performance report around April of 2018. Others only started showing up in June of this year.

I'm unclear about the significance of this and what it means. I don't even understand if this is a good or bad thing. Is this evidence of some type of cannonical/dupicate content problem? Why the multiple listings?

phranque

10:27 pm on Aug 7, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



these urls containing document fragment identifiers are appearing as sitelinks in the search results and GSC is reporting on the performance of those sitelinks.
this has been a thing in the serps for at least 10 years.
it is usually a good thing if sitelinks appear in your search results and you should probably want to know how they perform.

this was discussed here recently:
Google discovers links with URL fragments - Safe to remove after page load? [webmasterworld.com]

Broadway

11:04 pm on Aug 7, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Thanks phranque, and thanks for the link to the thread.

aristotle

12:54 am on Aug 8, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I've clicked the "Pages" option.

Those are valid URLs but they're not separate pages. They refer to different sections of a single page.

Dimitri

10:48 am on Aug 8, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Just to say, that, at some point or may be already on some level, each anchor might be considered different pages. Several sites are using ajax or other methods to serve different content based on the anchor.

For example the site [caniuse.com...] . Now all URLs are just the domain name with an anchor value.

So , I am sure that, as it will start getting used more often , Search engines, will start taking this in consideration.

phranque

11:14 am on Aug 8, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



For example the site [...] . Now all URLs are just the domain name with an anchor value.

So , I am sure that, as it will start getting used more often , Search engines, will start taking this in consideration.

you might notice if you are interested enough to discover that none of these urls are indexed by google.

Dimitri

12:08 pm on Aug 8, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



you might notice if you are interested enough to discover that none of these urls are indexed by google.

Yes, this is why I said at "some point", and "will start taking this in consideration". If more and more sites are using this methode, SE will adapt .

phranque

12:40 pm on Aug 8, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



If more and more sites are using this methode, SE will adapt .

from Section 4. URI References of RFC 2396 [ietf.org]:
A URI reference may be absolute or relative,
and may have additional information attached in the form of a
fragment identifier. However, "the URI" that results from such a
reference includes only the absolute URI after the fragment
identifier (if any) is removed and after any relative URI is resolved
to its absolute form.

phranque

12:45 pm on Aug 8, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Several sites are using ajax or other methods to serve different content based on the anchor.

if you are referring to shebang/hashbang/hash fragment urls, these have been deprecated by google for almost 4 years now:
[developers.google.com...]
 

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