How does Google treat hash fragment inside a canonical URL

Question

I have seen many websites using slugs in their URL to boost SEO such as this:

http://example.com/article/1543/how-to-boost-seo/

I was thinking if I could do something like this instead:

http://example.com/article/1543#how-to-boost-seo

and specify it as the canonical URL. This article from Google says, "It's a hint that we honor strongly." Does that include the fragment identifier, or would it be discarded?

Answer 1

Fragment identifiers are traditionally used to identify a portion of document for client-side applications. As stated in the specification Google adopted:

Traditionally, hash fragments (that is, everything after # in the URL) have been used to indicate one portion of a static HTML document. ...hash fragments are not part of HTTP requests (and as a result they are not sent to the server)

Consequently as this covers, the Googlebot ignores hash fragments by default. Therefore for this URL:

http://example.com/article/1543#how-to-boost-seo

Googlebot should just look at the resource returned by the server: http://example.com/article/1543 while ignoring the hash fragment: how-to-boost-seo.

So essentially the resource for the above URL is the canonical URL after normalization (i.e., removing the fragment).

The purpose of using a slug is to identify a page as a human-readable keyword. Using a fragment confuses this purpose and obscures its readability:

/how-to-boost-seo is a lot more readable than: /1543#how-to-boost-seo

So in short, using a fragment as a slug would not seem beneficial to users or search engines.