Letting search engines know that different links to identical pages stress different parts of the page
- by balpha
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.
