Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
-
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise?
Thank you.
-
Search engines and informed individuals are used to ?'s as like Takeshi said "query parameters" or "query variables". For everyone else it might look "questionable" (Sorry just had to say it
) -
That is a great answer. Parameters have caused some grief for me thank you!
-
The question mark and the values that follow are known as "query parameters" or "query variables", and they actually can impact your SEO. Google can look at the different variations of the URL, and index them as separate pages, leading to duplicate content.
The easiest fix for this is to put a canonical tag in your header, so that Google knows the what the proper URL for the page is supposed to be. You can also tell Google to ignore specific query parameters in Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > URL Parameters.
-
Nope
You may find this question from earlier today helpful -
http://moz.com/community/q/weird-back-link-showed-in-moz-crawl
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
-
Why is hosting good for SEO?
I've heard a few people mention this now. I have seen hosting packages range from £5 to £1000 per month, and I understand that each comes with their own amounts of storage space, bandwidth and all. Now I understand that page speed is important to SEO and the type of hosting will dictate your page speed, but other than this why is hosting important to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
How to switch from URL based navigation to Ajax, 1000's of URLs gone
Hi everyone, We have thousands of urls generated by numerous products filters on our ecommerce site, eg./category1/category11/brand/color-red/size-xl+xxl/price-cheap/in-stock/. We are thinking of moving these filters to ajax in order to offer a better user experience and get rid of these useless urls. In your opinion, what is the best way to deal with this huge move ? leave the existing URLs respond as before : as they will disappear from our sitemap (they won't be linked anymore), I imagine robots will someday consider them as obsolete ? redirect permanent (301) to the closest existing url mark them as gone (4xx) I'd vote for option 2. Bots will suddenly see thousands of 301, but this is reflecting what is really happening, right ? Do you think this could result in some penalty ? Thank you very much for your help. Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JeremyICC0 -
Where do we focus from an SEO perspective?
I run a digital business development consulting company. Our core has always been centered around consulting with client to develop strategy and then working with a set of vendors in a variety of different services types to implement the strategy. I'm struggling right now to determine the best approach for our own SEO. Our website is http://phase2solutions.net. What suggestions would you have on the approach here? Feel free to share your service as well as the tactical end is something we are looking to outsource. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phase2solutions0 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
Does Google Read URL's if they include a # tag? Re: SEO Value of Clean Url's
An ECWID rep stated in regards to an inquiry about how the ECWID url's are not customizable, that "an important thing is that it doesn't matter what these URLs look like, because search engines don't read anything after that # in URLs. " Example http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 Basically all of this: #!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 That is a snippet out of a conversation where ECWID said that dirty urls don't matter beyond a hashtag... Is that true? I haven't found any rule that Google or other search engines (Google is really the most important) don't index, read, or place value on the part of the url after a # tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
The format for image SEO
Hi there. After looking at a few SEO videos relating to image SEO it seems important to ensure images are SEO'd just as well as pages. I however have a question. If the page is Meta titles the following: Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech And this particular page contains five images which are each variants of this product, how is it best to SEO them? Would you go with the: Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech Front Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech Back Online for Equine | Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Ladies Breech Side and so on... Or would this result in keyword stuffing with Google's new over-optimisation rules. Would it be better to rename them so they are all individual? I am considering deleting the images, renaming them on the server as the SEO proof name and then re-uploading them so the Image caption = filename. Am I on the right track? If you need the page: http://www.onlineforequine.co.uk/jodhpurs-breeches/22-just-togs-ladies-latina-denim-breech.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlineforequine0 -
My URLs are a mess!
Hi all, I am having some SEO done on my website and I have been asked to tidy up my URLs. They show the word 'brand' or 'item' and an ID number in every one. http://www.societyboardshop.co.uk/brand/Girl-Skateboards/153/ http://www.societyboardshop.co.uk/item/Girl%20Skateboards%20Guy%20Mariano%20OG%20Guy%20Skateboards/898/ My developer says that we cannot remove these words as they 'form part of a routing table' for each url. How do I fix these URLs? Many thanks in advance. Paul.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul530 -
Brackets in a URL String
Was talking with a friend about this the other day. Do Brackets and or Braces in a URL string impact SEO? (I know short human readable etc... but for the sake of conversation has anyone relaised any impacts of these particular Characters in a URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0