Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How do you check the google cache for hashbang pages?
-
So we use http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:x.com/#!/hashbangpage to check what googlebot has cached but when we try to use this method for hashbang pages, we get the x.com's cache... not x.com/#!/hashbangpage
That actually makes sense because the hashbang is part of the homepage in that case so I get why the cache returns back the homepage.
My question is - how can you actually look up the cache for hashbang page?
-
I was actually trying to give you the tools to figure out what's cached and indexed. You can just run a site search for the content and look at the cache, though. For example:
If nothing shows up it's probably not indexed.
-
Thanks Carson but that wasn't the question.
The question was how to check the cache.
-
Generally I'd avoid hashtags or hashbangs if you have large amounts of content you want indexed behind a hashbang. Use pushState instead whenever it makes sense for the user to actually change the URL.
The general rule is that if you can see the content in your page source (ctrl+u version), it's probably being indexed. That means that client-side AJAX behind hashbangs is generally not indexed, where server-side will generally get indexed.
If for some reason you must use hashbangs, AND you must use client-rendering content, create an HTML snapshot of your page for Google. Generally, though, that's more effort than changing one of the above.
-
I think google has stopped responding to cache requests on hashbang pages all together.
See here... **I'm just playing with random urls and don't see google cache 404'ing as it should **http://recordit.co/XBlo3U2A73
You can really put anything there it won't work.
-
Searching for indexed & duplicate content. I put a line or two in quotes and Googled it. I found most of the UTMs that way. Once you do that, it's a simple change to site:yoursite.com inurl:UTM
-
Thanks a lot, Matt.
I'm curious.. how did you exactly find the version with the utm codes that are being cached?
-
Strangely, browseo sees it correctly: http://www.browseo.net/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fplaceit.net%2F%3F_escaped_fragment_%3D%2Fstages%2Fsamsung-galaxy-note-friends-park
I'm not 100% sure why this is happening on your site specifically. Normally the #! isn't too big of an issue for cache but I've seen it have a few hiccups. These pages seem to be indexed fine but they aren't generating cache.
I did find a few working but only those with UTM codes:
This doesn't look like it's working but view the source code - the content is actually there. I found it by Googling the content in " marks.
-
What you're saying make sense and our urls are setup like this but we still don't see just the homepage come up when looking up the google cache with the esc fragment version
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://placeit.net/?escaped_fragment=/stages/samsung-galaxy-note-friends-park
https://placeit.net/?escaped_fragment=/stages/samsung-galaxy-note-friends-park
homepage - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://placeit.net/?escaped_fragment=
-
Let's use a Wix example site (not a client, just a sample from their page) as my example. Say you wanted to check:
http://www.kingskolacheny.com/#!press/crr2
In the source code I see the escaped fragment URL. This is the one you can find a cache for:
http://www.kingskolacheny.com/?escaped_fragment=press/crr2
That leads me to: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.kingskolacheny.com/?escaped_fragment=press/crr2
If your #! URLs are not setup this way, you will struggle to see it. One page websites are ... one page. But if you have escaped fragment URLs setup, you should be able to submit those and go from there.
The easiest way I know to find these is Screaming Frog, Ajax tab, Ugly URL field - try that one.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Is Google able to see child pages in our AJAX pagination?
We upgraded our site to a new platform the first week of August. The product listing pages have a canonical issue. Page 2 of the paginated series has a canonical pointing to page 1 of the series. Google lists this as a "mistake" and we're planning on implementing best practice (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html) We want to implement rel=next,prev. The URLs are constructed using a hashtag and a string of query parameters. You'll notice that these parameters are ¶meter:value vs ¶meter=value. /products#facet:&productBeginIndex:0&orderBy:&pageView:grid&minPrice:&maxPrice:&pageSize:& None of the URLs are included in any indexed URLs because the canonical is the page URL without the AJAX parameters. So these results are expected. Screamingfrog only finds the product links on page 1 and doesn't move to page 2. The link to page 2 is AJAX. ScreamingFrog only crawls AJAX if its in Google's deprecated recommendations as far as I know. The "facet" parameter is noted in search console, but the example URLs are for an unrelated URL that uses the "?facet=" format. None of the other parameters have been added by Google to the console. Other unrelated parameters from the new site are in the console. When using the fetch as Google tool, Google ignores everything after the "#" and shows only the main URL. I tested to see if it was just pulling the canonical of the page for the test, but that was not the case. None of the "#facet" strings appear in the Moz crawl I don't think Google is reading the "productBeginIndex" to specify the start of a page 2 and so on. One thought is to add the parameter in search console, remove the canonical, and test one category to see how Google treats the pages. Making the URLs SEO friendly (/page2.../page3) is a heavy lift. Any ideas how to diagnose/solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason.Capshaw0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Does Google give weight to the default measurement units (metric / imperial) on pages?
Hi, We run a series of weather websites that cater for the units (feet, metres, Celsius, Fahrenheight etc.) for the users by means of detecting their geo-location. So users in the US see the site in feet, Fahrenheight and pretty much the rest of the world gets metric units. My concern is that if we view the cached version of our pages as seen by the Googlebot out of Mountain View, California, it shows that our geoIP switch to imperial units has been activated for every location in the World. The question is, does the fact that we appear to cater for countries who use metric units by showing (in Google's eyes) Imperial units by default count against us from an SEO point of view? Thanks in advance for any comments, Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nickruss0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0