[*]Google’s John Mueller explained why Google Search Console sometimes shows URLs with hashtags in performance reports and clarified that there’s no need to be concerned that that the wrong URLs are being indexed.
URLs With #Anchor Hashtags
What John Mueller discussed in the Bluesky post is URLs with hashtags that look like this:
https:example.com/example-url/#:~:text=
URLs with hashtags show up in Google Search Console (GSC) could give the impression that the wrong URLs are being indexed by Google but according to John Mueller, that’s not the case.
Some Reports Use Canonical URLs
He wrote that some GSC reports show the canonical URL. What that means is that Google will report one URL even if there are multiple versions of the same URL recording for that report, presumably such as indexing reports.
Mueller wrote:
“Every now and then, someone posts about finding “hashtags” (URLs with #anchors) in Search Console. Here’s what’s up with that (and none of this is new). Most search features report on the canonical URL (the main URL used for indexing), a handful don’t. Sometimes search uses anchors -“
Some URLs Are Reported With #Anchors (Hashtags)
Mueller then said that the Performance report shows URLs with #anchors, also referred to as URLs with hashtags. These are links from Google’s search results that lead to a specific section of a page.
The URL part could look like this: