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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Checking a New Type of Google Result URL

I’m now seeing a new type of Google search result URLs (outside the US). How about you? Here’s the result page URL on a search for foo:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=foo&btnG=Google+Search&fp=[some-string*]

Previously (and when pasting this in another browser where I’m not logged in), this was something like:

http://www.google.com/search?q=foo&more-parameters-follow...

In other words, there’s now a fragment (an anchor) in the URL which determines the results. On first glance this may seem like a subtle change, but it may carry some differences in terms of what crawlers see when accessing the URL (will most of today’s crawlers grab the page as it’s not disallowed from indexing but then, ignoring the anchor, not see the result content?), or calculating linklove (will PageRank be added to the main domain, and does that differ from what is the case for the old type of result URL?).

Also see the previous discussion of ranking data in Google referrer URLs.

*Anyone knows what “fp” stands for?

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