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It fails in practice though. Gawker tried this, and reverted it a few months later when it became clear that their traffic from search engines took a nose-dive.

hunvreus 14y ago
Interesting. You're sure it's not because most of the advertising business right now is organized around the "more pageviews == more prints == more $$" logic? It sure doesn't help to sell to advertisers. But we're mostly building products that need to sell to users, we care a lot more about UX and relevancy.
- Isofarro 14y ago
  Very sure. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596263 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596263 -- that's what I wrote two years ago: Once of the reasons Gawker moved away from hashbangs is that they weren't well supported by Google, despite this being a "Google specification". Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, has some interesting tweets about the use of hashbangs over the past few months: Nick Denton: "Dip in uniques largely because of drop in Google refers. Pageviews (which are driven more by core audience) less affected." -- http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61152134929981440 http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61152134929981440 Nick Denton: "Google does not fully support "hashbang" URLs. So we're eliminating them rather than waiting for Mountain View." -- http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61465859079671808 http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61465859079671808 Nick Denton: "Yeah, I'd advise against hashbang urls. Will kill search traffic -- even if you abide by Google protocol." -- http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/62595141927583745 http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/62595141927583745 So here's a high-profile failure of hashbangs when it comes to being indexed by Google. Which means if it's search indexability you want, hashbangs isn't it. The Google spec just isn't mature enough, or well supported by Google search itself.

hunvreus 14y ago

Interesting. You're sure it's not because most of the advertising business right now is organized around the "more pageviews == more prints == more $$" logic? It sure doesn't help to sell to advertisers. But we're mostly building products that need to sell to users, we care a lot more about UX and relevancy.

Isofarro 14y ago
Very sure. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596263 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596263 -- that's what I wrote two years ago: Once of the reasons Gawker moved away from hashbangs is that they weren't well supported by Google, despite this being a "Google specification". Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, has some interesting tweets about the use of hashbangs over the past few months: Nick Denton: "Dip in uniques largely because of drop in Google refers. Pageviews (which are driven more by core audience) less affected." -- http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61152134929981440 http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61152134929981440 Nick Denton: "Google does not fully support "hashbang" URLs. So we're eliminating them rather than waiting for Mountain View." -- http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61465859079671808 http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61465859079671808 Nick Denton: "Yeah, I'd advise against hashbang urls. Will kill search traffic -- even if you abide by Google protocol." -- http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/62595141927583745 http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/62595141927583745 So here's a high-profile failure of hashbangs when it comes to being indexed by Google. Which means if it's search indexability you want, hashbangs isn't it. The Google spec just isn't mature enough, or well supported by Google search itself.