Barry points out a thread this morning from WMW that goes back to a discussion Jeff and I had earlier this year about anchor tags in URLs (www.domain.com/index.html#footer). How do the search engines handle such links? Our experience has been that Google drops all pound signs from URLs.

Wizard from WMW seems to agree:

I'd say #anchor is not a part of URL actually, browser doesn't send it to server with HTTP request.


Google doesn't treat /page.html#anchor as different URL than /page.html. It might be possible that keywords after # mark matter a little, but in Google links database everything after # is stripped.

This seems like the logical thing to do in my opinion, since there would in fact be huge duplicate content problems.

So, what? Here's what: You need an affiliate program? Build it to craft your affiliate links to read like http://www.zunch.com#affid1074 instead of using question marks. Parse the URL at the server level for the ID, and set the cookie or whatever it is you do. It should work just as well as using a question mark, and you get the added benefit of every affiliate link pointing directly to your home page. That is, to the search engines, the link looks like a typical backlink, with no affiliate tracking variable. Nice!