Adding a Query String to a Static URL is that good or bad?

[rpaiva]

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.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Call me Tom.

I'm happy to be of help!

[rpaiva]

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.

[BlueprintMarketing]

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

[rpaiva]

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)

[Anti-Alex]

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/

[BlueprintMarketing]

UTM query is ok

make sure you have the correct non UTM URL  tagged with a canonical

Tom

[Hutch42]

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).

[rpaiva]

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

[Hutch42]

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.