Adding a Query String to a Static URL is that good or bad?
-
I just went through this huge process to shorten my URL structure and remove all dynamic strings. Now my analytics team wants to add query strings to track clicks from the homepage. Is this going to destroy my clean url structure by appending a query string to the end of the URL structure.
-
Call me Tom.
I'm happy to be of help!
-
Thanks Thomas from Blueprint Marketing,
That answer was excellent, I was just using the capitalization as an example. I am only using lower case on our URL's. I hope with my cannon issue any page that has a CID in the URL gets pointed back to the version without.
-
Hi,
your example of a canonical tag is an example of what you do not want to do.
_ This is the example I'm referencing_
www.pageA.com/?CID=1324 with a canonical tag pointing to: www.pageA.com/?CID=1324)
There are two issues I want to point out.
you do not want to create a canonical tag for a CID URL meaning the URL www.pageA.com can have a canonical ( this example is if you want to keep a capital letter in your URL)
www.pageA.com/?CID=1324 would have a canonical of nevermind ?CID=1234 that is why the canonical matters to keep Google from mistaking www.pageA.com/?CID=1324 with if you intended to have a capital letter www.pageA.com
Using a capital letter unless you have very good reason do not put cap's in your URLs Linux based servers servers e.g. Google bot consider a URL with a capital letter different from the same URL all lowercase.
So www.pageA.com UNLESS you intended to keep a capital letter in the URL would look like this
If you had you intended to keep the capital letter
To simplify this is much as I can. The ideal canonical tag for www.pagea.com/?CID=132 would be
as long as the ?CID=1234 is not in the canonical URL check out
http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
I have a Canonical tagging situation on my website. With every page created a caon tag is automatically placed on the page pointing to itself (example: Page A pointing to Page A)
So my concern is that placing an analytic query string to my page is going to have a canon tag pointing to itself (example: www.pageA.com/?CID=1324 with a canonical tag pointing to: www.pageA.com/?CID=1324)
-
Yup as Thomas says above adding any tags to the end of a full static URL will have no effect on the clean URL structure as long as you set your canonicals correctly.
If the URL is http://website.com/page/?CID=1234, the canonical should be http://website.com/page/
-
UTM query is ok
make sure you have the correct non UTM URL tagged with a canonical
Tom
-
CID= is a campaign code for Omniture I believe, but you use it for tagging external campaigns that link back to your site. You should find out more as to why your team wants to do this.
If you have canonical tags on each page to themselves the query string should not effect your SEO (they shouldn't anyways, but it is safest to do it).
-
I currently do have all my pages canon tagged to themselves my developers set it up in a way that is complicated to make "Page A" Canonical to "Page B" and i'm working on that change.
The analytic team is wanting to play a CID= into the URL structure and i'm scared that it will cause duplicate urls
-
You may want to speak with your team as to why they want to add query strings, your analytics program should not need internal links to have query strings added, and if you are using Google Analytics adding their UTM query strings to internal links will cause major errors with your data.
If they do have legitimate reasons to query tag internal links, just make sure that you have all of your pages canonical tagged to themselves and then you won't have to worry about it messing up your URL structure.
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
-
Tool to check page size for multiple url's at once
In Google Analytics under Site Speed > Page Timings, you can see all pages and their loading time compared to the average. This is very handy to check which pages maybe need some optimization. I would also like to check the size for these pages in a similar way. There are multiple tools out there like GTmetix and Pingdom that give specific information and performance insights. The problem is that they are limited to check one url at a time. Does someone know about a tool to check the page size of multiple url’s at once (and if possible to easily export to Excel)? That way I can check which pages are big in size and research/optimize them. Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | Mark.0 -
Campaign Tracking URLs and the Impact on SEO
Hi Guys, I am setting up tracking for a couple of offline campaigns in Analytics and would just like to know if this will cause issues. The situation is below: Two URLs Ranking Well Organically: www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-b URLs Setup for the Purpose of Offline Campaigns www.domain.co.uk/campaign1 www.domain.co.uk/campaign2 Plan to Track this in Analytics www.domain.co.uk/campaign1 redirecting to www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a_&utm_medium=qr&utm_source=test1&utm_campaign=test1_ www.domain.co.uk/campaign2 redirecting to www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a&utm_medium=qr&utm_source=test2&utm_campaign=test1__ So the idea is that the user gets a nice simple URL to input from the off-line media (www.domain.co.uk/campaign1). This then redirects to one of the pages thats performing well organically (www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a) but with the relevant tracking (www.domain.co.uk/campaign1 redirecting to www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a&utm_medium=qr&utm_source=test1&utm_campaign=test1). The only way that the tracking URL can be accessed by the user is if the off-line media URL is entered. My main concern here is how Google will treat this. Obviously I don't want to cause issues with the two URLs that are ranking well organically. Would having a version of exactly the same URL, just with tracking do so? Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | CarlWint0 -
URL Structure for Study Guides
I'm creating study guides for various musicals, plays and operas. A few issues: I want to easily view in Google Analytics data for all study guides, data at the category level (musical,play, opera) and data for an individual show. I want urls to be as short as possible for usability purposes. Some show titles are the same for shows in different categories. For example, there is the play Romeo and Juliet but there is also an opera Romeo and Juliet. Each study guide contains multiple sections that will live on different URLs (overview, context, plot summary, characters) What would be the ideal URL structure? Here's what I was currently thinking we should use: /show/play/romeo-juliet/ /show/play/romeo-juliet/context /show/play/romeo-juliet/plot /show/play/romeo-juliet/characters
Reporting & Analytics | | stageagent0 -
IP address changed, subdomains added - how will affect?
Hello, Two weeks ago we have changed IP address of our website, also we've added new subdomains for static content (like img.domain.com & js.domain.com) and changed the links on the site accordingly. The old IP is also working and the old links are accessible too. For some reason, since the change, we see a SE (google) traffic constant drop everyday. I've read only Google's support (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34437) that such change shouldn't affect the ranking anyhow. On the other hand I've consulted with SEO people and was told that such change may affect in the close new feature (for couple of weeks) and then bring the ranking back. I would like to hear another opinion, I want to get back to our board with approved answers. Please advice. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | maddogx0 -
Rank #1 for a 110,000/month query search, but barely any traffic?
Hi guys, As it says in the title, we've recently reached the absolute #1 position for a certain key phrase in the travel industry which the Google Keyword Tool tells me averages 110,000 local (165,000 global) searches a month... however we have received barely any traffic at all over the past TWO months for it and I'm trying my best to determine why. We've checked on multiple different devices with all forms of personalisation off, different browsers, 3G connections as opposed to office Wi-FI etc. and it still returns us as the #1 rank. Meta descriptions and title tags are pretty much pristine if I don't say so myself, however what should be a very lucrative key phrase is currently returning little to no traffic results. Has anyone had experience in a similar situation to this? Any possible causes that I might be missing? Would greatly appreciate any help. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | ExperienceOz0 -
How to remove unwanted dynamic parameters from a URL in Google Analytics
Hi, Would really appreciate some help with this. I have been experimenting with RegEx to achieve this but as I’ve never used it before am currently failing miserably. We have conversion pages i need to set goals for that are formatted as below: https://www.domain.co.uk//Application_Form/(S(ewhbqp5cki0mppuzukunkqno))/enterCardDetails.aspx I need to remove the (s(xxx)) section from the URL as rather than one pages i currently have thousands of unique URL's. What’s catching me out is that as it’s not a URL parameter I can’t discount and as half way through can’t just do head matches etc to /entercarddetails Help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sarbs0 -
Track banner ad with google analytics
Hi We have a top banner ad on an external renown site only to attrack traffic. It does show up in google analytics, but i have seen some increase in (direct) / (none) traffic. Is there anyway i can track it when banner is showed from 2 separate URLs http://www.tv2torget.no/bedrift/netthandel/ and http://www.tv2torget.no/bedrift/netthandel/barneklaer/ Thanks Dan Lærum
Reporting & Analytics | | danlae0 -
Why are Seemingly Randomly Generated URLs Appearing as Errors in Google Webmaster Tools?
I've been confused by some URLs that are showing up as errors in our GWT account. They seem to just be randomly generated alphanumeric strings that Google is reporting as 404 errors. The pages do 404 because nothing ever existed there or was linked to. Here are some examples that are just off of our root domain: /JEzjLs2wBR0D6wILPy0RCkM/WFRnUK9JrDyRoVCnR8= /MevaBpcKoXnbHJpoTI5P42QPmQpjEPBlYffwY8Mc5I= /YAKM15iU846X/ymikGEPsdq 26PUoIYSwfb8 FBh34= I haven't been able to track down these character strings in any internet index or anywhere in our source code so I have no idea why Google is reporting them. We've been pretty vigilant lately about duplicate content and thin content issues and my concern is that there are an unspecified number of urls like this that Google thinks exist but don't really. Has anyone else seen GWT reporting errors like this for their site? Does anyone have any clue why Google would report them as errors?
Reporting & Analytics | | kimwetter0