Old AJAX Crawling Scheme URL (Hashbang)
What This Means
The page has a URL containing a #! (hashbang) identifier — a pattern from Google's deprecated AJAX Crawling Scheme. These URLs were designed to allow JavaScript-rendered content to be crawled by creating escaped fragment URL variants.
Why It Matters for SEO
The AJAX Crawling Scheme was deprecated by Google in 2015 and support was removed in 2018. Hashbang URLs (#!/page) create technical complexity: the fragment portion is client-side only and not sent to the server, requiring special handling; they produce awkward URLs that are difficult to share and link; and they reference a crawl protocol that no longer works.
What the Platform Checks
The platform identifies URLs with #! patterns in the path. Fires on detection.
How to Fix It
- Migrate from hashbang URLs to standard paths using the HTML5 History API (pushState-based routing).
- Replace
#!/pagewith/pageand configure the server to serve the correct content for each URL. - Set up 301 redirects from old hashbang URLs to the new clean URLs.
- After migration: remove the meta fragment tag and any _escaped_fragment_ handling.
Find every hashbang URLon your site
The audit identifies every URL using the deprecated hashbang pattern so you can plan the migration to clean URLs.