#658 – escaped_fragments

We recently did a site rebuild from scratch. We installed route66 pro and now have dozens of pages of broken links in the redirects plugin. All of the links have "escaped_fragment" in them. I know this is from Google indexing ajax content but it hurts a sites SEO to have them. How do we solve this problem?

Hi,

Can you please post an example URL? How did you end up with escaped fragments in Joomla? Are those links from the previous website implementation?
If there is a pattern on those URLs you may can use robots.txt to indicate Google to ignore them or set a redirect rule on your server to send them back to your home page. But I wouldn't bother.
Requesting a full site index from scratch in search console is an indicator for Google that the site has changed. That should be enough.

Regards

There was no "previous implementation" as this is a fresh install of Joomla, and the only app I have is Route66 Pro. Escaped fragments are normal, but they should not be broken links as Google crawler simply indexes them differently than the page content itself. Something in how route66 is working is preventing Google from indexing the Ajax content separate from the pages themselves. and causing the escaped_fragments from being indexed I think.

I wonder how Google discovered those URLs since there is no previous implementation. But in any case, according to their official documentation escaped fragments are deprecated since 2015: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/ajax-crawling/docs/specification .

Unless those URLs have nothing to do with this. If you share the URLs I would be able to provide more help.

Regards