Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. How to fix issues regarding URL parameters?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    How to fix issues regarding URL parameters?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    2
    8
    2704
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • CommercePundit
      CommercePundit last edited by

      Today, I was reading help article for URL parameters by Google.

      http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1235687

      I come to know that, Google is giving value to URLs which ave parameters that change or determine the content of a page. There are too many pages in my website with similar value for Name, Price and Number of product. But, I have restricted all pages by Robots.txt with following syntax.

      URLs:
      http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=name
      http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=price
      http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=100

      Syntax in Robots.txt
      Disallow: /?dir=
      Disallow: /
      ?p=
      Disallow: /*?limit=

      Now, I am confuse. Which is best solution to get maximum benefits in SEO?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • AlanMosley
        AlanMosley @CommercePundit last edited by

        No i dont think so, even if the thought they were duplicate, then they will pick one as the original. so one of them will rank.

        If you are still concerned use tha canonicall tag, rather them remove them from index

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • CommercePundit
          CommercePundit @CommercePundit last edited by

          Your concern is that, Google will crawl following all pages. If I will not do any thing with those pages. Right?

          http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps

          http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=100&p=2

          http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=60&p=2

          http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=40&p=2

          Now, my website is on 3rd page of Google for Discount Table Lamps keyword.

          I have fear that, If Google will crawl multiple pages with duplicate Title tag so it may mesh up current ranking for Discount Table Lamps keyword.

          What you think about it?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • AlanMosley
            AlanMosley @CommercePundit last edited by

            If the content is different, then dont do anything, but if it is duplicate us ethe canonical tag.

            The meta tages are not a problem, you are not going to get flaged for that, it would be better if you could make them unique but this is a very small problem

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • CommercePundit
              CommercePundit @CommercePundit last edited by

              Will it really work? Because, both page have different content.

              http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps have 100 products and

              http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=100&p=2 have different + unique 100 products.

              One another problem is regarding Meta info. Both page have same Meta info. If Google will index both pages so it may create warning message for duplicate Meta info across too many pages.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • AlanMosley
                AlanMosley @CommercePundit last edited by

                Thats the advice i gave you, put a canonical tag in the page

                rel="canonical" href="http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps"/>

                if google finds http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=name

                it will know it5 is mean to be http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • CommercePundit
                  CommercePundit @AlanMosley last edited by

                  Honestly, I did not getting it. Because, I have read one help article about URL parameters by Google.

                  It shows me some different thing. Google suggested to use Google webmaster tools. But, I have restricted all dynamic pages by robots.txt.

                  So, I want to know best practice which may help me to gain my crawling and no of indexed pages.

                  AlanMosley CommercePundit 5 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • AlanMosley
                    AlanMosley last edited by

                    I would simplty put a rel canonical in the page point ing to the true URL. so SE's will see them as one page.

                    It is better to use cononical for the reasons in the google doc you posted, goolge may not pick the nest url to be the canonical, you should make that choice for them

                    CommercePundit 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    Browse Questions

                    Explore more categories

                    • Moz Tools

                      Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                    • SEO Tactics

                      Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                    • Community

                      Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                    • Digital Marketing

                      Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                    • Research & Trends

                      Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                    • Support

                      Connect on product support and feature requests.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • Searchout

                      SEO effect of URL with subfolder versus parameters?

                      I'll make this quick and simple.  Let's say you have a business located in several cities.  You've built individual pages for each city (linked to from a master list of your locations). For SEO purposes is it better to have the URL be a subfolder, or a parameter off of the home page URL: https://www.mysite.com/dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/dallas/index.php or http://www.mysite.com/?city=dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/index.php?city=dallas

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Searchout
                      0
                    • kirin44355

                      Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?

                      Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
                      https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
                      https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
                      https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
                      https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
                      https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
                      https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this? 
                      Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. 
                      Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
                      Chris Gorski

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
                      0
                    • alex_goldman

                      All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself

                      Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
                      https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
                      0
                    • pauledwards

                      Internal links and URL shortners

                      Hi guys, what are your thoughts using bit.ly links as internal links on blog posts of a website? Some posts have 4/5 bit.ly links going to other pages of our website (noindexed pages). I have nofollowed them so no seo value is lost, also the links are going to noindexed pages so no need to pass seo value directly. However what are your thoughts on how Google will see internal links which have essential become re-direct links? They are bit.ly links going to result pages basically. Am I also to assume the tracking for internal links would also be better using google analytics functionality? is bit.ly accurate for tracking clicks? Any advice much appreciated, I just wanted to double check this.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards
                      0
                    • RoxBrock

                      Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?

                      I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock
                      1
                    • underscorelive

                      What is the best URL structure for categories?

                      A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted.  However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive
                      0
                    • seoppc2012

                      Does Google index url with hashtags?

                      We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc2012
                      0
                    • knowyourbank

                      URL Structure for Directory Site

                      We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority? Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders): State Page /state/ City Page /city-state/ Business Page /business-city-state/
                      4) Location Page  /locationname-city-state/ or.... Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down: State Page /state/ City Page /state/city Business Page /state/city/business/
                      4) Location Page  /locationname-city-state/ Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure. What do you think?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knowyourbank
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    • Digital Marketers
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.