Query string parameters and canonical links

[JHWXS]

Hello everyone,

My site uses query string parameters in a few places to manage tasks like pagination of lists. Eg: http://www.example.com/destinations/somewhere?page=2

I have set a canonical link with the href of the page without the query string

but still getting thousands of duplicate title/meta description reports from these pages. Is there something I can do to change this?

Do search engines actually penalise for use of query string parameters like this? They seem so commonplace, even for sites which use an absolute URI with no query string to serve content.

Thanks

[Shawn_Huber]

The links between the pages should contain rel=prev and rel=next the also help let SE's know that the content is paginated.

[Sheena_Schleicher]

If you're getting the dup content error reports in the Moz crawl diagnostics, see the Staff response here: http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-title-tags-even-with-rel-canonical

As gazzerman1 shared, you should be in the clear from any duplicate content penalties caused by URL parameters, especially with having rel next/prev or canonical tags setup.

[gazzerman1]

There are a few options, you can also implement the noindex no follow on those pages. John Muller at Google has repeatedly said there is no internal duplicate content penalties. However it will need to determine the best page to show, so clear signals like the canonical are good.

You can also look at the "URL Parameters" section in webmaster tools if you are confident you know what you are doing. This can be used to inform Google about query strings you want it to ignore.

There is nothing wrong with query strings, in fact Google has recently said it likes them instead of very long keyword stuffed url's.