URL Parameters
-
Hi Moz Community,
I'm working on a website that has URL parameters. After crawling the site, I've implemented canonical tags to all these URLs to prevent them from getting indexed by Google. However, today I've found out that Google has indexed plenty of URL parameters..
1-Some of these URLs has canonical tags yet they are still indexed and live.
2- Some can't be discovered through site crawling and they are result in 5xx server error.
Is there anything else that I can do (other than adding canonical tags) + how can I discover URL parameters indexed but not visible through site crawling?
Thanks in advance!
-
I'm also facing the same problem with my website pages. My Blackpods pro website pages don't show the exact permalink urls.
-
Hi there,
Thanks very much for your response. I checked the sitemap and there are no URL parameters listed - only the canonical URL listed on the sitemap.
If you have any other suggestions it'll be much appreciated.
Thank you!
-
Hi Rajesh,
Thank you for your response. I cannot share the website due to client's confidentiality but basically when I search to find a stockist {brand name}, Google lists similar URLs below on the first page. The pages are showing a list of stockists depending on the product availability:
1-website.com/find-stockist?model=10 (5xx status code)
2-website.com/find-stockist?model=11 (200 status code)
3-website.com/find-stockist?model=10 (5xx status code)
4-website.com/find-stockist?model=11 (200 status code)Thank you!
-
Hi Gaston,
Thanks very much for your time. The canonicals have implemented around a month ago and the pages are almost identical. I discovered all URL parameters without performing an advanced search.
Also, I come across the 5xx errors when I clicked indexed URL parameters on Google SERP and I cannot discover them when I crawl the site with Screaming Frog.
I'd appreciate if you have any other suggestions based on your experience!
Many thanks
-
Just so you know, if a URL results in a 5XX server error then it usually won't render your canonical tag to begin with! You might want to check your sitemap XML, to check that it's not 'undoing' your canonical tags by feeding these URLs to Google. Indexation tags must be perfectly aligned with your sitemap XML, or you are sending Google mixed messages (e.g: a URL is in sitemap XML so Google should index it, but when it is crawled it contains a canonical tag citing itself as non-canonical, which is the opposite signal)
Everything which Gaston said is right on the money
-
I think you need to show some examples.
-
Hi there,
Its important to note that canonicals are a signal. Google can obey them if its algorithm considers that those pages are actually canonicals between each other.
In my experience, this does not happen immediately, it usually takes Google some time to figure out if the canonicalization is correct. Keep in mind that pages being canonicalized HAVE TO be nearly identical and refer to the same topic.
And on the indexation part, pages can be indexed and be shown only when you search for that specific URL or using any advanced search parameter (such as site:).
More information about canonicals
- Consolidate duplicate URLs - Google Search supportRegarding the second issue, if you refer to "site crawling" as what you do with an external tool, such as Screaming Frog or Moz, you are getting 5xx errors because that tool is making to many requests, try lowering its crawl frequency. I know for a fact that Screaming Frog allows you to do that.
But, unfortunately, I don't know any other way of discovering URL parameters in bulk but using an external tool.Hope it helps,
Best luck.
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 shorten very long URLs?
Hi Moz Community! If the nav architecture URL is long, like this: https://www.savewildlife.org/wildlife-conservtion/endangered-species-act-protections/endangered-species-list/birds/mexican-spotted-owl can I and should I shorten that new destination URL to make it easy for Google to see that the page topic is really the owl, like this: https://savewildlife.org/endangered-species-list/mexican-spotted-owl Thank you! Jane
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CalamityJane771 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
URLs with parameters + canonicals + meta robots
Hi Moz community! I'm posting a new question here as I couldn't find specific answer to the case I'm facing. Along with canonical tags, we are implementing meta robots on our pages (e-commerce website with thousands of pages). Most of the cases have been covered but I still have one unanswered case: our products are linked from list pages (mostly categories) but they almost always include a tracking parameter (ie /my-product.html?ref=xxx) products urls are secured with a canonical tag (referring only to the clean url /my-product.html) but what would be the best solution regarding the meta robots? For now we opted for a meta robot 'noindex, follow' for non canonical urls (so the ones unfortunately linked from our category/list pages), but I'm afraid that it could hurt our SEO (apparently no juice is given from URLs with a noindex robots), and even maybe prevent bots from crawling our website properly ... Would it be best to have no meta robots at all on these product urls with parameters? (we obviously can't have 'index, follow' when the canonical ref points to another url!). Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessicaZylberberg0 -
Where is the best location for my primary keyword in my URL?
http://moz.com/learn/seo/url says: http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html However I am wondering about structuring things this a little backwards from that: http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ (this would be an introduction and overview of the topic described by the primary keyword)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/ (this would be a category landing page with snippets from articles within the niche described by the secondary keyword, which is itself a niche of the primary keyword)
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/article-title/ (in-depth article on a topic within the scope of the secondary, which is within the scope of the primary) Where http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ is the most important page targeting the most important URL. Thoughts?0 -
Complex URL Migration
Hi There, I have three separate questions which are all related. Some brief back ground. My client has an adventure tourism company that takes predominantly North American customers on adventure tours to three separate destinations: New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. They previously had these sites on their own URL's. These URL's had the destination in the URL (eg: sitenewzealand.com). 2 of the three URL's had good age and lots of incoming links. This time last year a new web company was bought in and convinced them to pull all three sites onto a single domain and to put the sites under sub folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand). The built a brand new site for them on a Joomla platform. Unfortunately the new sites have not performed and halved the previous call to action rates. Organic traffic was not adversely affected with this change, however it hasn't grown either. I have been overhauling these new sites with a project team and we have managed to keep the new design but make usability/marketing changes that have the conversion rate nearly back to where it originally was and we have managed to keep the new design (and the CMS) in place. We have recently made programmatic changes to the joomla system to push the separate destination sites back onto their original URL's. My first question is around whether technically this was a good idea. Question 1 Does our logic below add up or is it flawed logic? The reasons we decided to migrate the sites back onto their old URL's were: We have assumed that with the majority of searches containing the actual destination (eg: "New Zealand") that all other things being equal it is likely to attract a higher click through rate on the domain www.sitenewzealand.com than for www.site.com/new-zealand. Having the "newzealand" in the actual URL would provide a rankings boost for target keyword phrases containing "new zealand" in them. We also wanted to create the consumer perception that we are specialists in each of the destinations which we service rather than having a single site which positions us as a "multi-destination" global travel company. Two of the old sites had solid incoming links and there has been very little new links acquired for the domain used for the past 12 months. It was also assumed that with the sites on their own domains that the theme for each site would be completely destination specific rather than having the single site with multiple destinations on it diluting this destination theme relevance. It is assumed that this would also help us to rank better for the destination specific search phrases (which account for 95% of all target keyword phrases). The downsides of this approach were that we were splitting out content onto three sites instead of one with a presumed associated drop in authority overall. The other major one was the actual disruption that a relatively complex domain migration could cause. Opinions on the logic we adopted for deciding to split these domains out would be highly appreciated. Question 2 We migrated the folder based destination specific sites back onto their old domains at the start of March. We were careful to thoroughly prepare the htaccess file to ensure we covered off all the new redirects needed and to directly redirect the old redirects to the new pages. The structure of each site and the content remained the same across the destination specific folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand/hiking became sitenewzealand.com/hiking). To achieve this splitting out of sites and the ability to keep the single instance of Joomla we wrote custom code to dynamically rewrite the URL's. This worked as designed. Unfortunately however, Joomla had a component which was dynamically creating the google site maps and as this had not had any code changes it got all confused and started feeding up a heap of URL's which never previously existed. This resulted in each site having 1000 - 2000 404's. It took us three weeks to work this out and to put a fix into place. This has now been done and we are down to zero 404's for each site in GWT and we have proper google site maps submitted (all done 3 days ago). In the meantime our organic rankings and traffic began to decline after around 5 days (after the migration) and after 10 days had dropped down to around 300 daily visitors from around 700 daily visitors. It has remained at that level for the past 2 weeks with no sign of any recovery. Now that we have fixed the 404's and have accurate site maps into google, how long do you think it will take to start to see an upwards trend again and how long it is likely to take to get to similar levels of organic traffic compared to pre-migration levels? (if at all). Question 3 The owner of the company is understandably nervous about the overall situation. He is wishing right now that we had never made the migration. If we decided to roll back to what we previously had are we likely to cause further recovery delays and would it come back to what we previously had in a reasonably quick time frame? A huge thanks to everyone for reading what is quite a technical and lengthy post and a big thank you in advance for any answers. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activenz
Conrad0 -
Is using dots in URL path really a problem?
we have a couple of pages displaying a dot in the URL path like domain.com/mr.smith/widget-mr.smith It displays fine in chrome, firefox and IE and for the user it may actually look better than replacing it by _ or -. Did this ever cause problems to anybody?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Any statement from google about it?
Should I change existing URLs? If so, which other characters can I use in the URL instead of underscore and dash, since in our system dash and underscore are already used for rewriting other characters. Thanks0 -
Correct URL Parameters for GWT?
Hi, I am just double checking to see if these parameters are ok - I have added an attachment to this post. We are using an e-commerce store and dealing with faceted navigation so I excluded a lot of parameters from being crawled as I didnt want them indexed. (they got indexed anyway!). Advice and recommendations on the use of GWT would be very helpful - please check my screenshot. thanks, B0gSmRu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How canonical url harm our website???
Even though my website has no similar/copied content, i used rel=canonical for all my website pages. Is Google or yahoo make any harm to my SERP's?? EX: http://www.seomoz.org is my site, in that i used canonical as rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.seomoz.org" to my home page like that similar to all pages, i created rel=canonical. Is search engine harm my website???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MadhukarSV0