Does "?" in my URL have a negative effect?
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I am having a difficult time finding specific information about the effect, if any, having a ? within the URL structure. We have the descriptive keyword phrase followed by the ? location id as in this example:
http://www.adventuresonly.com/adventure-locations/things-to-do-in-arizona?stateid=124
Any feedback on effect and a corrective process to improve if necessary would be appreciated!
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The question mark sign signals the beggining of URL parameters. This will not impact your keyword however if the URL parameters do not significantly alter the content of you page then this could cause duplicate content issues as Search engines will see each parameter variation as a unique URL.
Search engines will try to identify these but to help them out you should Discount URL parameters in Webmaster tools for the respective search engine (Not just Google), and to avoid link equity being lost or dilluted implementing the Rel=cannonical tag to the page and referenceing back to a sensible root page version will mean all your inbound links work together.
Hope this helps.
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