How much of a URL does the robot see ?

[alinkfred]

We use a system of split testing on our site that involves including A or B as part of the URL as outlined below.
www.sitename.com/A/index.htm and www.sitename.com/B/index.htm

We send a percedntage of our traffic to each split but we have a no index tag on the A and the B splits to avoid having duplicate contrent being indexed.

The robots just see www.sitename.com/index.htm

Am I right in thinking that we could use something like
www.sitename.com/index.htm#SPLIT_A

Specific question - Is it correct that the google robot will ignore anything after the # in a url. If so we can use the www.sitename.com/index.htm#streama instead of www.sitename.com/A/index.htm

Thanks

[crankydave]

That is correct. Anything after the # (hash) is ignored so Google will only see 1 URL.

Dave

[wige]

But, a hash is an onpage link. Are you intending to use the hash in a script or rewrite, or for something else?

[alinkfred]

We intend to use #splitA or #splitB to distinguish which split the visitor has been assigned to for a/b split testing purposes

[wige]

Please be aware that most browsers (I only tested this in Firefox, but I think it also applies to Internet Explorer) do not transmit anything after the #. The #splitA or #splitB portion would not show up in any logs or be accessible to your server side scripts.