Link building, does query string matter?

[rasmusbang]

Hi All, We have some partners which link to our site, and they put "?ref=SITENAME" so we Can identify the source of the link....but does this matter to the search engines? Does this count as a different page than the one without the query string? -Rasmus

[JaspalX]

Yep. Remember to do the same in Bing's webmaster app too.

[rasmusbang]

I have just checked GWT, and we had over 7000 pages with the ref string.

So I have changed the setting for this query string, telling Google that it does not affect the content of the page. That should be it right? From now on the Google should regard http://www.betxpert.com?ref=XXX as http://www.betxpert.com right?

[JaspalX]

Canonical will work yes, but I think it will be quicker and easier to change handling of the query parameter in gwt and bwc. If you use other query parameters canonical might be best.

[rasmusbang]

As far as I can see in GWT, I have pages with the "?ref=XXX" which gives me pages with the same meta descriptions and titles.

So you are saying that using canonical this would help it?

If i am missing link juice to my home page because of this reference I really want to fix it

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

I think you're asking a question about duplicate content, and Google possibly indexing more than one version of the same page?

To avoid this from happening, add the canonical tag to the head of all your pages;

Each canonical should contain the original URL for each page.  This will avoid indexation of the same page multiple times.

Jassy is likely correct, that the engines know how to ignore referral parameters, but you should have a canonical in place in most cases anyway.

-Dan

[JaspalX]

Google and bing probably are ignoring them (you can check how they're being handled if you look in GWT or BWC at how parameters are being handled). To be 100% sure, tell bing and google to ignore the ref parameter.

I'm assuming you only really care about bing and google.