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.
What is the best way to treat URLs ending in /?s=
-
-
Hi Alex
These are parameters that sit after the main URL and often include 'sort' 'page'. (They can also be created in some eCommerce pages as 'products' but these should be dealt with a mod-rewrite to show properly constructed URLs with category name and title). There are a number of ways with dealing with them:
1. Google search console - you have to be very careful messing with the rules in parameter handling but for some, this is the way.
- 'sort' then you can tell Google that it narrows the content on the page - you can then choose to let Googlebot decide or block the URLs - I often block them as they just create skinny and duplicate content.
- Pagination - 'page' you can tell Google that this paginates and then let Google decide. Look at rel/prev tag on those pages as well.
- Attributes - like size and colour - I generally block those as they just create skinny duplicates of main categories
- Others - like Catalog - it depends on what platform you use but there could be other parameters being created - I block most of them as they create useless URLs
2. Robots.txt
You can use this file to block the indexing of these pages depending on the parameter by excluding them from being followed by the search bots. Once again be very careful as you don't want to accidentally block indexing of useful areas the site.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
3. Canonicals
If you are able a great way of dealing with attributes like size and colour is to canonicalize back to the non size specific URL - this is a great way of maintaining the link juice for those URLs which may otherwise be lost if you blocked them all together. You add a rel=canonical tag pointing to the non-parameter version.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
4. As a last resort you can 301 redirect them but frankly, if you have dealt with them properly you shouldn't have to. It's also bad practice to have live 301 redirects in the internal structure of a website. Best to use the correct URL.
There is more reading here:
https://moz.com/community/q/which-is-the-best-way-to-handle-query-parameters
https://moz.com/community/q/do-parameters-in-a-url-make-a-difference-from-an-seo-point-of-view
https://moz.com/community/q/how-do-i-deindex-url-parametersRegards
Nigel
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
-
Moz-Specific 404 Errors Jumped with URLs that don't exist
Hello, I'm going to try and be as specific as possible concerning this weird issue, but I'd rather not say specific info about the site unless you think it's pertinent. So to summarize, we have a website that's owned by a company that is a division of another company. For reference, we'll say that: OURSITE.com is owned by COMPANY1 which is owned by AGENCY1 This morning, we got about 7,000 new errors in MOZ only (these errors are not in Search Console) for URLs with the company name or the agency name at the end of the url. So, let's say one post is: OURSITE.com/the-article/ This morning we have an error in MOZ for URLs OURSITE.com/the-article/COMPANY1 OURSITE.com/the-article/AGENCY1 x 7000+ articles we have created. Every single post ever created is now an error in MOZ because of these two URL additions that seem to come out of nowhere. These URLs are not in our Sitemaps, they are not in Google... They simply don't exist and yet MOZ created an an error with them. Unless they exist and I don't see them. Obviously there's a link to each company and agency site on the site in the about us section, but that's it.
Moz Pro | | CJolicoeur0 -
GWMT / Search Analytics VS OpenSiteExplorer
Just had the experience of using OSE data to show what we call "linkrot" to a client -- only to find that GWMT / Search Analytics shows no such thing. Fortunately the client is an old friend and no face was lost, but it was dicey there for a bit as I have come to rely on and reference OSE again and again and again, OSE showed Domain Authority dropping by about 1/3 in the last 12 months, presumably due to old links getting broken, linking sites changing their architecture etc. And of course, ranking is tanking, as you would expect. But Google shows many more (and much more spammy looking!) backlinks. Has anyone had any experience benchmarking the 2 data sets of backlinks against each other? Dr Pete?
Moz Pro | | seo_plus
Does one update more frequently than another? Do you trust one more than another?? If so, why?? Thanks!0 -
Best tools for an initial website health check?
Hi,
Moz Pro | | CamperConnect14
I'd like to offer free website health checks (basic audits) and am wondering what tools other people use for this? It would be good to use something that presents the data well. Moz is great but it gets expensive if I want to offer these to many businesses in the hope of taking on just a few as clients and doing a full manual audit for them. So far I've tried seositecheckup.com (just checks a single page though), metaforensics.io and mysiteauditor. Thanks!0 -
Capitalization matters? Are Keywords treated as Case Sensitive?
I have searched the forum for this questions and basically found the following answer: “Neither Google nor SEOmoz treat keywords as case sensitive. For example, “Jobfair” and “jobfair” should return the same results.” http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-capitalization-matter http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-keywords-case-sensitive http://www.seomoz.org/q/capitalisation-of-campaign-keywords-why-does-this-affect-traffic-but-not-rankings How then can it be that I get the following results in the Rankings Report? (see example pic) And more importantly, which one is correct? sCx74sd.jpg
Moz Pro | | lwadmin0 -
Use of the tilde in URLs
I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e. I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old. It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing? I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect. Thanks for any help you can provide.
Moz Pro | | fdb0 -
Is having the company's address in the footer (or header) of each webpage important for SEO?
Is having the company/office's address in the footer (or header) of each webpage important for SEO? Your page for the Geotarget tool says that having the address in this element helps search engines find your location. My question is, how important or relevant is this to SEO? How does knowing the address influence SEO? Is it best SEO practice to put the address in the footer of every webpage? http://www.seomoz.org/geotarget
Moz Pro | | richardstrange0 -
Best Practices for having Social Profiles indexed
There has been a lot of talk lately around social profiles potentially improving your brand as well as search. What I'd like to know is the best practices for getting those social profiles crawled and indexed so they actually provide a good link to my site. I'm also wondering what the difference between what Linkscape sees and what Google sees and when I'm looking at Open Site Explorer's rankings on one of those social profiles how can I be sure that Google sees it the same way. I ask this because a lot of these profiles are not well internally linked to. An example is about.me, it's a potentially great link, but it's essentially an island, and even after dropping a couple Twitter links to my profile, Open Site Explorer shows and Page Authority of 1, and it's not even indexed with Google. What I did last night was put a link to my about.me, flickr and wedding wire in my Connect menu drop down on my site to get that crawled hopefully soon. Are there other methods of getting those crawled and indexed so it starts passing some juice?
Moz Pro | | WilliamBay
What do you guys do?0 -
Seomoz Spider/Bot Details
Hi All Our website identifies a list of search engine spiders so that it does not show them the session ID's when they come to crawl, preventing the search engines thinking there is duplicate content all over the place. The Seomoz has bought a over 20k crawl errors on the dashboard due to session ID's. Could someone please give the details for the Seomoz bot so that we can add it to the list on the website so when it does come to crawl it won't show it session ID's and give all these crawl errors. Thanks
Moz Pro | | blagger1