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Bryan171

: Letting search engines know that different links to identical pages stress different parts of the page When you follow a permalink to a chat message in the Stack Exchange chat, you get a view

@Bryan171

Posted in: #CanonicalUrl #DuplicateContent #SearchEngines

When you follow a permalink to a chat message in the Stack Exchange chat, you get a view of the transcript page for the day that contains the particular message. This message is highlighted in yellow, and the page is scrolled to its position.

Sometimes – admittedly rarely, but it happens – a web search will result in such a transcript link. Here's a (constructed, obviously) example: A Google search for


strange behavior of the bibliography command site:chat.stackexchange.com


gives me a link to this chat message. This message is obiously unrelated to my query, but the transcript page does indeed contain my search terms – just in a totally different spot.

Both the above links lead to the same content, and Google knows this, since both pages have

<link rel="canonical" href="/transcript/41/2012/4/9/0-24" />


in their <head>. The only difference between the two links is Which message has the highlight css class?.

Is there a way to let Google know that while all three links have the same content, they put an emphasis on a different part of the content?

Note that the permalinks on the transcript page already have a #12345 hash to "point" to the relavant chat message, but Google appears to drop it.

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@Voss4911412

Given the incredible popularity of Google (it is 90% of incoming traffic on Stack Overflow, for example), couldn't you simply check the referer?

Example referer strings from search engines:


bing.com/search?q=javascript+date+to+timestamp&src=IE-SearchBox&FORM=IE8SRC
google.de/search?q=apache+restart&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:de:official&client=firefox-a
us.yhs.search.yahoo.com/avg/search?fr=yhs-avg-chrome&type=yahoo_avg_hs2-tb-web_chrome_us&p=concatenation+in+mysql


I know Google is switching to a lot of SSL, so that might affect whether or not you get the referer, but if you do, you can definitely jump to the matching section in the chat transcript based on the search query string passed in there.

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