Earlier today I noticed that among the WordPress blogs I run, Technical Blogging was the only one that generated a random string of characters appended to the permalinks of my posts. It looked something like this:
https://technicalblogging.com/a-new-blog-a-new-adventure/#.Tu9uCXN5vmM
My first assumption was that this was some sort of hash used by the WP Super Cache plugin, but even disabling that didn’t get rid of the issue. After investigating the code a bit, I was able to track the issue to a window.location.hash call in a JavaScript file that’s used by the Add This plugin.
Comparing the Add This settings of my various blogs, it immediately became clear that this annoyance was caused by having Track address bar shares checked. Unchecking that option got rid of the extra #. hash string.
Here are the full Add This settings I now use for this blog:
This enables Facebook, Twitter, Google+ counters within posts and pages, but not on the homepage or on other archives/categories.
Should you be experiencing this same problem, unchecking that particular setting, as you can see here, is all you need to do to remedy the issue.
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I too noticed this around the same time. The problem occurs across browsers and websites. I never would have associated it to my WordPress Blog. I’ll give this a shot and see what happens. — thanks
thanks for the info, got the same issue too!
thanks, for the info, because I have problem such. :).
Thanks for the info. Your Add This settings fixed the problem.
Antonio,
I read this post with fascination, as I am suddenly plagued with 90% of my blog’s URLS not linking properly. All get 404’s.
I had noticed recently that all my URLs had the /#.(characters) appended after the URL.
I didn’t know why, concluding it has something to do with tracking. Boy, was I mad when I discovered my links are all broken.
I tried unchecking that setting in AddThis, refreshing, emptying cache, etc, but the issue persists, Also tried deleting my Google Analyitics ID from AddThis settings, as that was mentioned in another post on this same issue.
Can you possibly check my blog and see what might still be causing this maddening issue?
Im getting emails about it, and I’m stumped!
thanks a TON!
David Julian
Hi Dave,
my money would actually be on your permalink structure or web server configuration. I’d check that everything is correct under Settings -> Permalinks. Ensure also that your .htacess file matches what you see on that page.
I was about to post this in Blogger Help. But you solved it so easily. Can anyone tell me, if it affects SEO or Google analytics stats??
It only affects AddThis’ analytics, so both SEO and Google Analytics are unaffected by this.
Thankyou for your post. Initially I thought my site was hacked, but reading your post saved my day.
Thanks for posting this! It was driving me crazy trying to figure out where the extra URL text was coming from. This was the only site I found on the topic.
hear hear — thank you for sharing and saving the sanity of many fellow WP users!
I just had a client that was experiencing a variation on this AddThis problem. They had installed a widget manually on their site and used the script option
I changed that from True to false
That solved the problem and removed the odd tracking code at the end of the url.
Thanks for the heads up!
I got planning to publish this specific inside Doodlekit Aid. However you resolved that thus effortlessly. Can anyone show me, whether it influences SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION or perhaps Yahoo and google statistics numbers??
Very grateful. Thank you.
One unticked box ( address bar shares: ) solved the issue. So damn simple 😀
However, you’ve made it simple with your blog post.
Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot for this, The extra characters had been bothering me for a while. I use share this, and unchecked the option to track the site url. Thanks again!
Hi Antonio,
Thanks for the info, your solution has helped in resolving the same error I was encountering.
Regards.
Thank you, worked great.
Thank you for the post. I works on my blog.
Thank you so much. I was googling round in circles until I found this. I’ve just changed the setting and I need to clear the cache to make sure it works. I checked permalinks first then thought it might be a hack so this is very reassuring.
Thanks again!
Wow! Thanks much for this! I almost thought my blog was hacked until I checked your post.
Thanks once again; Now I know what actually caused those ugly strange strings.
Thank you for this post, Antonio. I’ve experienced this problem on one of my blogs and was able to get rid of the random characters, thanks to this guide. Thank you again…
Thank you so much for this post. I was actually stressed and worried, thinking I had been hacked when I saw the extra characters. Your post helped me solved it, more grease to your elbow.
this article really saved my time..
thank you so muchhhhhh.