Many of us are not familiar with the word “fragment identifier”, actually we encounter it every time we browse some websites but we just ignore it. Who cares after all but now let us give a little time with this so called “fragment identifier”.
To make things simple, I got this good definition of fragment identifier from Wikipedia. I will quote it.
Fragment Identifier Definition from Wikipedia:
“Fragment identifier is a short string of characters that refers to a resource that is subordinate to another, primary resource. The primary resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and the fragment identifier points to the subordinate resource.”
-Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier
You can easily identify a fragment URL because it contains hash mark # and followed by characters. But the hash mark # is not a part of a fragment identifier it is a separator between the primary resource and the fragment identifier, specifies a location within the resource.
Sample: www.sample.com/one.html#print
The www.sample.com/one.html is the primary resource and the “print” is the fragment identifier.
In regards of site indexing, does fragmented URL good or bad? Actually Googlebot ignores fragments by default. Since Googlebot only fetches and parses HTML and don’t have JavaScript engine, it usually disregard fragment identifiers and only look at the resource returned from the web server. It means that any fragment URLs is impossible to be indexed and appear directly in Google searches. So whether it is good or bad to your site it depends on how you will use it and its purpose to your site.
To make things simple, I got this good definition of fragment identifier from Wikipedia. I will quote it.
Fragment Identifier Definition from Wikipedia:
“Fragment identifier is a short string of characters that refers to a resource that is subordinate to another, primary resource. The primary resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and the fragment identifier points to the subordinate resource.”
-Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier
You can easily identify a fragment URL because it contains hash mark # and followed by characters. But the hash mark # is not a part of a fragment identifier it is a separator between the primary resource and the fragment identifier, specifies a location within the resource.
Sample: www.sample.com/one.html#print
The www.sample.com/one.html is the primary resource and the “print” is the fragment identifier.
In regards of site indexing, does fragmented URL good or bad? Actually Googlebot ignores fragments by default. Since Googlebot only fetches and parses HTML and don’t have JavaScript engine, it usually disregard fragment identifiers and only look at the resource returned from the web server. It means that any fragment URLs is impossible to be indexed and appear directly in Google searches. So whether it is good or bad to your site it depends on how you will use it and its purpose to your site.
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