Search Refinement URLs
-
My site is using search refinement and I am concerned about the URL adding additional characters when it's refined. My current URL is: http://www.autopartscheaper.com/Air-Conditioning-Heater-Parts-s/10280.htm and when someone chooses their specific year, make, and model then it changes to: http://www.autopartscheaper.com/Air-Conditioning-Heater-Parts-s/10280.htm?searching=Y&Cat=10280&RefineBy_7371=7708. Will this negatively affect SEO for this URL? Will the URL be counted twice? Any help would be great!
-
The URL can be counted twice and this is duplicate content. If Google sees a link to that second URL with the parameters on the end, it won't assume it's the same page as the page with the URL that doesn't have the parameters.
A few things you can do to mitigate this:
- In Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, if those parameters never result in unique pages, you can tell each search engine to ignore each one of those parameters. If you ignore all of those parameters within webmaster tools, the second URL example above will resolve to the first URL in their eyes of each search engine.
- You can set a rel canonical on all of your pages to the root page URLs. Then no parameters will ever affect the indexing of your pages.
I'd be a little wary of setting rel canonical on all of my pages (I don't do this so I can't report if it works or not), so I'd personally opt for option 1 and not option 2, although theoretically each one should solve the problem.
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
-
What to try when Google excludes your URL only from high-traffic search terms and results?
We have a high authority blog post (high PA) that used to rank for several high-traffic terms. Right now the post continues to rank high for variations of the high-traffic terms (e.g keyword + " free", keyword + " discussion") but the URL has been completed excluded from the money terms with alternative URLs of the domain ranking on positions 50+. There is no manual penalty in place or a DCMA exclusion. What are some of the things ppl would try here? Some of the things I can think of: - Remove keyword terms in article - Change the URL and do a 301 redirect - Duplicate the POST under new URL, 302 redirect from old blog post, and repoint links as much as you have control - Refresh content including timestamps - Remove potentially bad neighborhood links etc Has anyone seen the behavior above for their articles? Are there any recommendations? /PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ppseo800 -
News Errors In Google Search Console
Years ago a site I'm working on was publishing news as one form of content on the site. Since then, has stopped publishing news, but still has a q&a forum, blogs, articles... all kinds of stuff. Now, it triggers "News Errors" in GWT under crawl errors. These errors are "Article disproportionately short" "Article fragmented" on some q&a forum pages "Article too long" on some longer q&a forum pages "No sentences found" Since there are thousands of these forum pages and it's problem seems to be a news critique, I'm wondering what I should do about it. It seems to be holding these non-news pages to a news standard: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en For instance, is there a way and would it be a good idea to get the hell out of Google News, since we don't publish news anymore? Would there be possible negatives worth considering? What's baffling is, these are not designated news urls. The ones we used to have were /news/title-of-the-story per... https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/2481373?hl=en&ref_topic=2481296 Or, does this really not matter and I should just blow it off as a problem. The weird thing is that we recently went from http to https and The Google News interface still has us as http and gives the option to add https, which I am reluctant to do sine we aren't really in the news business anymore. What do you think I should do? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Website using search term as URL brand name to cheat Google
Google has come a long way over the past 5 years, the quality updates have really helped bring top quality content to the top that is relevant for users search terms, although there is one really ANNOYING thing that still has not been fixed. Websites using brand name as service search term to manipulate Google I have got a real example but I wouldn't like to use it in case the brand mentions flags up in their tools and they spot this post, but take this search for example "Service+Location" You will get 'service+location.com' rank #1 Why? Heaven knows. They have less than 100 backlinks which are of a very low, spammy quality from directories. The content is poor compared to the competition and the competitors have amazing link profiles, great social engagement, much better website user experience and the data does not prove anything. All the competitors are targeting the same search term but yet the worst site is ranking the highest. Why on earth is Google not fixing this issue. This page we are seeing rank #1 do not even deserve to be ranking on the first 5 pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch
Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Website Re-Launch - New URLS / Old URL WMT
Hello... We recently re-launched website with a new CMS (Magento). We kept the same domain name, however most of the structure changed. We were diligent about inputting the 301 redirects. The domain is over 15 years old and has tons of link equity and history. Today marks 27 days since launch...And Google Webmaster Tools showed me a recently detected (dated two days ago) URL from the old structure. Our natural search traffic has take a slow dive since launch...Any thoughts? Some background info: The old site did not have a sitemap.xml. The relaunched site does. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0 -
Canonical url issue
Canonical url issue My site https://ladydecosmetic.com on seomoz crawl showing duplicate page title, duplicate page content errors. I have downloaded the error reports csv and checked. From the report, The below url contains duplicate page content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trixmediainc
https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-caribbean-peach-o-27-item-162&category_id=40&brands=66&click=brnd And other duplicate urls as per report are,
https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40&click=colorsu&brands=66 https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40 https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40&brands=66&click=brnd But on every these url(all 4) I have set canonical url. That is the original url and an existing one(not 404). https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-caribbean-peach-o-27-item-162&category_id=0 Then how this issues are showing like duplicate page content. Please give me an answer ASAP.0 -
Google tagged URL an overly-dynamic URL?
I'm reviewing my campaign, and spotted the overly-dynamic URL box showing a few links. Reviewing it, they are my Google Tagged URLs (utm_source, utm_medium_utm_campaign etc) I've turned some internal links to Google Tagged URLs but should these cause concern?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Capitals in url creates duplicate content?
Hey Guys, I had a quick look around however I couldn't find a specific answer to this. Currently, the SEOmoz tools come back and show a heap of duplicate content on my site. And there's a fair bit of it. However, a heap of those errors are relating to random capitals in the urls. for example. "www.website.com.au/Home/information/Stuff" is being treated as duplicate content of "www.website.com.au/home/information/stuff" (Note the difference in capitals). Anyone have any recommendations as to how to fix this server side(keeping in mind it's not practical or possible to fix all of these links) or to tell Google to ignore the capitalisation? Any help is greatly appreciated. LM.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlS0