Query string parameters and canonical links
-
Hello everyone,
My site uses query string parameters in a few places to manage tasks like pagination of lists. Eg: http://www.example.com/destinations/somewhere?page=2
I have set a canonical link with the href of the page without the query string
but still getting thousands of duplicate title/meta description reports from these pages. Is there something I can do to change this?
Do search engines actually penalise for use of query string parameters like this? They seem so commonplace, even for sites which use an absolute URI with no query string to serve content.
Thanks
-
The links between the pages should contain rel=prev and rel=next the also help let SE's know that the content is paginated.
-
If you're getting the dup content error reports in the Moz crawl diagnostics, see the Staff response here: http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-title-tags-even-with-rel-canonical
As gazzerman1 shared, you should be in the clear from any duplicate content penalties caused by URL parameters, especially with having rel next/prev or canonical tags setup.
-
There are a few options, you can also implement the noindex no follow on those pages. John Muller at Google has repeatedly said there is no internal duplicate content penalties. However it will need to determine the best page to show, so clear signals like the canonical are good.
You can also look at the "URL Parameters" section in webmaster tools if you are confident you know what you are doing. This can be used to inform Google about query strings you want it to ignore.
There is nothing wrong with query strings, in fact Google has recently said it likes them instead of very long keyword stuffed url's.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
Should you do on-page optimization for a page with rel=canonical tag?
If you ad a rel=canonical tag to a page, should you still optimize that page? I'm talking meta description, page title, etc.
On-Page Optimization | | marynau0 -
Number of internal links and passing 'link juice' down to key pages.
Howdy Moz friends. I've just been checking out this post on Moz from 2011 and wanted to know how relevant it is today? I'm particularly interested in a number of links we have on our HP potentially harming important landing page rankings because not enough 'link juice is getting to them i.e) are they are being diluted by all the many other links on the page? (deeper pages, faqs, etc etc) It seems strange to me that as Google as has got more sophisticated this would still be that relevant (thus the reason for posting). Anyway, I thought I was definitely worth asking. If we can leverage more out of our on-page efforts then great 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Long url links
Just wondering about creating links.
On-Page Optimization | | Robotnik
Is it ok to have very long links?
Like: http://www.robotnik.com/computer-hardware-ram/8gb-ddr3-1600-desktop Is the above too long, is it better for SEO to be more to the point? Also For better SEO, is it better to use hyphens in a domain name or not?0 -
Is a Mega Menu with over 300 links in it hurting my rankings?
I got hit pretty badly by Panda 4.0 (1/3 of my traffic lost), and I'm fairly certain it was because Google had potentially indexed over 20 million pages from a site filtering piece of software and got done for duplicate content. I have since fixed that using URL Parameters and that 20 million is down to 2.7 million now and I have submitted a clean site map, so now I wait. I have just done a site relaunch and am trying to determine if there are any other issues. I run an online store, and I have a mega menu with well over 300 links in it - makes the user experience really quick and easy to jump exactly where you want - and then I have about 30 links in the footer. I know there's a 'no more than 100 links on a page' guideline for Moz, but does anyone know if Google is smart enough to see the same header / footer navigation structure on every page of a site and know it's navigation and not water down the rest of the links, or do I need to re-think and simplify my navigation? It's one of those things that's there for a user experience and now I'm worried that I'm being penalised. The site is www dot shopnaturally dot com dot au
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
Canonical tag?
I have an e-commerce website and the query strings of the URL's are causing duplicate content/titles. I'm thinking of adding a site-wide canonical tag which should fix them all. Any other ideas of making it neater or better?
On-Page Optimization | | KarlBantleman0 -
Blocking Google seeing outbound links?
Apart from rewriting the outbound url to look like a folder 'abc.co.uk/out/link1' and blocking the folder 'out' in the robots.txt file, along with also nofollowing the links as well, is there anything else you can do?
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hi All, New to SEOMoz, so thanks in advance for any answers! Looking at our Crawl Diagnostics and "Too Many On-Page Links" is first on the list. The site was build with the intention of users being able to quickly get to where they want to go with drop down menus (sub nav), so we built the navigation using bullet points/css. Yes, agreed there are too many links on each page from our navigation, main nav cats are 4 with sub nav about 40, but what is the best way to resolve the problem other then removing most of the links (from the sub nav drop down)? Could we just use the attribute rel=nofollow for the sub nav links? TIA
On-Page Optimization | | bmmedia0 -
Randomly Generated Links & Passing PageRank
Hi all, If you were to have links that were randomly generated on each refresh, how would they be treated? I would imagine that they are treated normally and isolated to each crawl. So Google would just see the link structure changing from crawl to crawl and therefore give no long term value to these links. Any ideas? Thanks for your responses! Nick
On-Page Optimization | | NickPateman810