John Mueller from Google explained why the Google search console sometimes shows URLs with hashtags in performance reports, and made it clear that it is not necessary to be feared that the wrong URLs are indicated.
Urls with #Anchor hashtags
What John Müller discussed in the Bluesky contribution are URLs with hashtags that look like this:
https:example.com/example-url/#:~:text=
URLs with hashtags in the Google Search Console (GSC) could give the impression that Google’s wrong urls are indicated, but according to John Mueller this is not the case.
Some reports use canonical URLs
He wrote that some GSC reports show the canonical URL. This means that Google reports a URL, even if there are several versions of the same URL recording for this report, presumably like indexing reports.
Mueller wrote:
“Every now and then someone publishes about finding” hashtags “(urls with #anchors) in the search console. Here is what is going on (and none of it is new). Most search functions report on the canonical URL (the main URL used for indexing), a handful. Sometimes the search uses anchor -“
Some URLs are reported with #Anchors (hashtags)
Mueller then said that the Performance Report Urls shows #Anchors, which are also called URLs with hashtags. These are links from Google’s search results, which lead to a certain section of one page.
The URL part could look like this:
/#:~:text=Example%20of%20text%20in%20a%20url%20from%20google%20serps.
And this leads to a section of a page that looks like this:
Mueller continued:
“… anchor, as in the left with #hashtags [*] – to link to a certain part of a page. You can see this when you click on a link in the search results and a sentence (called “text fragments”). Sometimes this is used to report in your performance report in the search console.
… here that come. You are not that indicated. I don’t love that there is a mix of canonical and non-canonical URLs in the performance report. However, some experienced SEOs appreciate it to separate them. It is not a sign of a problem. “
Performance reports with #Anchor URLS
This is useful to show the non-canonicalized #Anchor URLs in the performance report, since it shows that this special type of search result from Deep Link is sending traffic. The alternative is to find the statistics in the keyword reporting, but this does not show that the data traffic comes from a deep link to a side section that shows this type of reporting.
Read Müller’s contribution here.
Selected picture of Shutterstock/The Bold Bureau
