Do you lose link juice when stripping query strings with canonicals?
-
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?
-
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.
-
This is not 100% a fact, but i think you will lose "some" juice but certainly not significant!
-
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?
-
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
-
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!
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 I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
Will I lose Link Juice when implementing a Reverse Proxy?
My company is looking at consolidating 5 websites that it has running on magento, wordpress, drupal and a few other platforms on to the same domain. Currently they're all on subdomains but we'd like to consolidate the subdomains to folders for UX and SEO potential. Currently they look like this: shop.example.com blog.example.com uk.example.com us.example.com After the reverse proxy they'll look like this: example.com/uk/ example.com/us/ example.com/us/shop example.com/us/blog I'm curious to know how much link juice will be lost in this switch. I've read a lot about site migration (especially the Moz example). A lot of these guides/case studies just mention using a bunch of 301's but it seems they'd probably be using reveres proxies as well. My questions are: Is a reverse proxy equal to or worse/better than a 301? Should I combine reverse proxy with a 301 or rel canonical tag? When implementing a reverse proxy will I lose link juice = ranking? Thanks so much! Jacob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacob.young.cricut0 -
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
OSE provides Spam analysis for website link profile, Do Moz have a tool to check the link quality before placing a link? How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward1 -
Rel=canonical
My website is built around a template, the hosting site say I can only add code into the body of the webpage not the header, will this be ok for rel=canonical If it is my next question is redundant but as there is only one place to put it which urls do I need to place in the code http://domain.com, www.domain.com or http://www.domain.com the /default.asp option for my website does not seem to exist, so I guess is not relevant thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | singingtelegramsuk0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Content linking ?
If you have links on the left hand side of the website on the Navigation and content at the bottom of the page and link to the same page with different anchor text or the same would it help the page (as it is surrounded by similar text) or is the first one counted and this is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Competitors and Directory Links
Hi guys, wanted to get some input and thoughts here. I'm analyzing many competitor links for a specific client (even other clients actually as well) and come across a pretty heavy directory backlink profiles. has anyone here had success with directory listings? Seem many of the competitors backlinks are coming from directories. What say you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan1