How to prevent channel identifiers from showing up in the SERPs?
-
We append our urls with channel identifiers (?cid) to help us analyze where traffic is coming from. Recently, our appended urls with channel identifiers are showing up in the SERPs. How can we stop this from happening and prevent in the future? Has anyone had similar issues?
-
Ugh, yeah, I definitely don't like seeing those parameters indexed. Reaching out to the Moz team to see if anyone has used Adobe Experience Manager. If it weren't a CMS or analytics setup issue, I do think rel=canonical would be a good fit here, but it's possible there are better setup options for the product that I'm not aware of. Once they're indexed, though, it's typically going to mean rel=canonical or a redirect to get rid of them. You could use Google Search Console, but they've pulled back a lot of the parameter handling options (at least temporarily) in the new version.
-
We use Adobe Experience Manager
-
For example, if you google Morningstar Direct, the first organic search results include ?cid=RED_DIR0001. As you scroll through the search results, there are other instances of this happening.
-
Yeah, you may have options in your CMS. Challenge at this point is that those URLs are already indexed, so if you change your CMS settings to use a different kind of identifier (again, we're being very fuzzy on details) you may still need a solution to de-index those URLs.
-
What platform do you use for your website / shop? there can be other and more easy ways to correct this than the re-cononical.
But like Dr. Peter J. Meyers asks, need abit more information / link or something to help you with the best solution for youre current platform
-
There are a couple of ways to go about it, but this is a situation where the rel-canonical tag is probably your best bet. It'll attribute all of those URLs back to the parent URL, set up correctly. If you can provide some specifics (or even a semi-fictional example), I can try to give you more guidance.
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
-
The difference between organic searches in Acquisition and organic searches in Default Channel Grouping
Hi guys, We have a question. In Google Analytics, there are 2 types of identifying organic searches: through Acquisition and through Default Channel Grouping. On our website, we have some differences between the number of organic sessions. Which one do you think is more relevant? Which one do you use? Many thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | RIDGID_Europe0 -
Moz analytics showing joomla tag feature as duplicate page content
Moz Analytics is showing Joomla 3 tag pages as Duplicate Page Content because many articles are tagged with multiple words and therefore show up on the same tag-pages. example URL: www.domain.com/tag/tagID-tagname I already added "tag" as a URL parameter with Crawl=No URLs. Is there anything else I should do?
Reporting & Analytics | | modernmagic0 -
Moz is showing different "errors" than Webmaster tools
I have set up my Moz campaign and the crawl errors are showing multiple duplicate content and page titles however when I check my webmaster tools data, these errors are not showing up. Is this normal and who should I listen to?
Reporting & Analytics | | LabelMedia0 -
Google Analytics shows wrong traffic source
I was reviewing out traffic sources on GA for this past week's traffic history, and noticed a couple of visits & conversions that GA cited as coming from campaigns from emails that were sent out in 2012 and early 2013. it seems odd that we would have traffic & conversions from these older campaigns - on a regular basis. it's not even from one campaign, but from multiple campaigns. is it possible that it is a cookie issue? - i wonder if these visits were really from the email campaigns - or if they were from organic searches or other sources. Thoughts? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | S.S.N0 -
Why is my Technorati link no longer showing?
Hi, i had a Technorati link as my lop link showing in SEOmoz. its no longer showing. I verified that the blog is still listed with them. Does anyone know why that link is not in the campaign...or showing up in site explorer? Thanks, Kevin
Reporting & Analytics | | yandl0 -
Localhost:4444 Showing Up in Google Analytics
Hello All, Lately in my Google Analytics account I have noticed a referral source labelled: localhost:4444 The number of visits is really high from this source, but I have no idea (no clue!) what it actually means. Can anyone shed some light on what this is about? Should I be creating some sort of filter to screen out this as a referral source (assuming it is not legitimate)? Many thanks in advance. Cheers!
Reporting & Analytics | | Robert-B0 -
Why isn't Google showing the first keyword result in Analytics anymore?
Just checked my Google Analytics traffic sources under organic search and it dosen't display the first keyword, it says "not provided" is there another way of determining the #1 organic searched keyword that my site was found under?
Reporting & Analytics | | Randog0 -
Google: show all images indexed on a domain
Is there a way to display all images that google has indexed on a domain / subdomain? I'm basically looking for something like a site:-command for google image search.
Reporting & Analytics | | jmueller0