Some may speculate that Google doesn’t just index a URL and the content on that URL as a whole, but may index parts of a page independently. That is not true, Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “We don’t index parts of a page independently, we index the pages as a whole, and try to understand the context of the content there.”

This came up when Glenn pointed out a section from John Mueller in a Google hangout where John said it is super rare for Google to index content after the hash in the URL uniquely. John said Google might index urls with a hash if it knows it leads to unique content but it is super rare.

Here is what John said:

So two exceptions:

(1) The old AJAX crawling schema format, which I thought they stopped supporting completely but maybe not?

(2) A very very tiny number of sites we’ve recognized that URLs with the hash lead to unique content.

But back to Google indexing sections of a page separately, that is not true according to Google’s John Mueller. Google may show they have the # URLs indexed but that probably isn’t what is in the Google index but what Google might be linking to. Google can and has anchored searchers down to portions of content before – it does not mean Google indexed that part separately but rather it understands the content on the page.

Forum discussion at Twitter.