Do you lose link juice when stripping query strings with canonicals?

[YairSpolter]

It is well known that when page A canonicals to page B, some link juice is lost (similar to a 301). So imagine I have the following pages:

Page A: www.mysite.com/main-page which has the tag: <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.mysite.com="" main-page"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

Page B: www.mysite.com/main-page/sub-page which is a variation of Page A, so it has a tag

I know that links to page B will lose some of their SEO value, as if I was 301ing from page B to page A.

Question:

What about this link: www.mysite.com/main-page?utm_medium=moz&utm_source=qa&utm_campaign=forum

Will it also lose link juice since the query string is being stripped by the canonical tag? In terms of SEO, is this like a redirect?

[SajeetNair]

You can check the cache copy, in some cases Google appends the parameter and in some cases it does not. This depends on the authority of the specific URL.

[kayintveen_MD]

This is not 100% a fact, but i think you will lose "some" juice but certainly not significant!

[YairSpolter]

Thanks for the quick and thorough response, Sajeet.

I just need a little clarification:

In the example you gave: www.mysite.com/main-page?medium=abc this page will be canonicaled to www.mysite.com/main-page. Are you saying that in such a case I will lose some link juice but not when the query string has utm parameters? If this is what you mean, how do you know that Google treats different query strings differently?

[SajeetNair]

Hi,

Regarding UTM parameters, if implemented correctly, Google will not treat it as a separate URL. For example - www.mysite.com/main-page?utm_medium=moz&utm_source=qa&utm_campaign=forum and www.mysite.com/main-page will be treated as the same page.

For manual tagging always remember, you can only add the following parameters -

• Campaign Medium
• Campaign Source
• Campaign Term
• Campaign Content
• Campaign Name

Canonical tags should be placed under the following circumstances -

• When 301 is not an option
• When you append dynamic parameters to URLs that Google will treat as a separate entity For example - www.mysite.com/main-page?medium=abc

In your case I would suggest that there is no need to place a canonical tag since the tagging adheres to Google guidelines. However for hygiene purposes you can place a self canonical tag.

Note - I have noticed that in some PPC campaigns people append the URL with utm_adgroup. Please note that this is wrong technique and Google does not recognize it. In such scenarios, use auto tagging instead.

Regards,

Sajeet

[kayintveen_MD]

You asked a very similar question earlier: http://moz.com/community/q/are-links-with-query-strings-worse-for-seo

Like iQSEO-UK said back then we haven't seen big impact on SEO with urls with query strings and specially utm tracking. I personally havent had any issues as well with duplicated content, or results double in the search engines or something. When you 301 it, if will have some loss in juice, and i suggest with a canonical this does as wel a little bit, but nothing significant for sure!