Strange index.php#.

All of a sudden, Firefox and Internet Explorer (but not Chrome) are displaying my index page, in the address bar (when logged in), like this: http://---.com/index.php#.UdayY2066So - the part after #. changes when I use different profiles, I've noticed. I've cleared the cache. I've tried to think of anything I did today. Google search gave me nothing. I'm quite worried this could be... something sinister? Please help?

Umm, seems like it has stopped when I optimalized some database files... Still, what happened... and why? :)

No, it still happens. When logging in, the landing page is index page. So this one now shows index.php#.Uda4-m066So. When I right-click and separately open a new index page in a new window, then the address bar shows only index.php.

Now navigating from member.php to index.php, it says index.php#.Uda632066So - by the way, this all happens on the index page only... The appendices change everytime I re-load the index.php. No idea why or for what reason?

Check the source of your page. The # sign is normally used to point to a marker on that page

Thanks for your tip, but the source code for index.php shows nothing containg: for example it's Uda-X2066So, now.

Hm, it was probably a new block for Social Share, html block with some code from addthis.com. I removed it and it has stopped. I'm not even surprised. The last time I was adding addthis.com code in the form of those animated buttons, it killed many scripts on the page, including simple messenger, shoutbox, pop-up member menus...

Yes, it was Social Share block, it does the same on my view polls page, the only other place it's been placed on.
I wonder. Should I leave it there, is the addition to the address in the address bar harmless, or not?

I would remove it until it was fixed. Even if it was only to stop incorrect indexing of pages

:) Removing it, then.

Yes it's being added by "addthis" for tracking purposes. Google ignores anything after the # so it doesn't effect SEO. There was a thread about this before but I can't find it now.. Long story short its fine.

The following was written by JohnMu (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland (24/09/09))

Hi efdev
We generally ignore the "fragments" (as in http://domain.com/path#fragment) when crawling, indexing and ranking since this is generally just something that is handled on the client side. There are some cases where we're experimenting with showing them in the snippet (as in Colin's example), to help users to find parts of a page quicker, so if you have large pages, that might be something to consider. You do not need to (& cannot) mention these fragments in Webmaster Tools.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/C0BTQOzy46U

I believe these snippets are now common, and although google most likely is clever enough to recognise the added extension to the url, I still would not use it. This module adds more than you like, it adds too much