Canonical Tags & GWT Parameters

[94501]

A site I'm working on has canonical tags which I find to be accurate, regardless of tracking parameters or anything else added to the url. The tag looks like:

And we have alot of parameters in Google Search Console that look like

Parameter                                Crawl

page                                         Let Googlebot Decide

destination                                Let Googlebot Decide

filters                                        Let Googlebot Decide

Since all of our parameters follow a question mark, like

http://www.examplesite.com/questions/avocados?source=ad12345

and all of our pages have canonical tags showing the representative url without the additional parameters, why wouldn't we just have the one parameter in GWT as

Parameter                                Crawl

?                                               Representative URL

I ask because I find that Google analytics shows pages with parameters as landing pages in search, which has me concerned about Google seeing it as duplicate content.

Thanks! Best... Darcy

[94501]

Thanks, Dirk!

[DirkC]

If Google for some reason chooses another url as the preferred version rather than the canonical I think you can assume that links to the duplicates are counted as links to the preferred version - no hard evidence to confirm this however. 
If you check the Best Practices

• Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don't link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.

So if possible - rather link to the canonical than the parameter version.

On duplicate content in general - there is an interesting article on Kissmetrics - https://blog.kissmetrics.com/myths-about-duplicate-content/

Dirk

[94501]

Hi Dirk,

One last clarification...

If Google ignores the canonical and chooses to take the url with parameters seriously, do you think this is causing a duplicate content issue or at least loss of link juice problem?

For instance, the navigation has parameters. If Google chooses to see a page with parameters as index-worthy instead of the canonical, is it then two duplicates splitting the link juice flowing to what we hoped was the one true url for the page? That would be no bueno.

Thanks! Best... Darcy

[DirkC]

The problem with canonical url is that it's just a request to Google to index the canonical rather than the real url - Google however is not obliged to do this (to quote google:

"This (=canonical) indicates the preferred URL to use so that the search results will be more likely to show users that URL structure. (Note: We attempt to respect this, but cannot guarantee this in all cases.)"

Example: if all your internal links go to mysite.com/page¶m=xyz with canonical mysite.com/page Google will probably still rather index the real url mysite.com/page¶m=xyz rather than the canonical version.

If you want to be absolutely sure that the parameter version is not indexed you should redirect the parameter version to the non-parameter version with a 301 which is a (binding) directive that Google has to follow.

You could use the parameter tool in Webmaster tools - but you run a risk that if you do it the wrong way Google will not index these pages at all. In any case - it will not solve your reporting issue in Analytics (as people coming from other sources with parameters will still be measured on the parameter url)

Dirk

[94501]

HI Dirk,

Super helpful insight... thanks!

On the people still visiting the page, if they are landing there out of search, why is Google showing them the url with parameters as opposed to just the representative url? That's the part that has me concerned... landing out of search on a page with parameters.

Best... Darcy

[DirkC]

If you added the canonicals there is no need to configure parameters in search console.

The issue you have in Analytics is not the same - even if google is respecting the canonicals people are still visiting the pages with the parameters and these are tracked in analytics. You can however tell analytics to ignore the parameters and only measure the traffic on the "main" version of the page. A detailed how to can be found here: http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/03/29/remove-url-parameters-from-google-analytics-reports/

Dirk