Questions regarding Google's "improved url handling parameters"
-
Google recently posted about improving url handling parameters http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html
I have a couple questions:
-
Is it better to canonicalize urls or use parameter handling?
-
Will Google inform us if it finds a parameter issue? Or, should we have a prepare a list of parameters that should be addressed?
-
-
-
It seems like canonicalizing the URLs is still a good idea. For one, there are other search engines that respect the tag, so you want them to do the right things. However, it does sound like for Google that this could replace the need for canonicalization tags due to URL parameters. If you have duplicate content that's not caused by URL parameters, you'd still need the canonical tag. Just to be safe, I'm still doing both.
-
When I logged into my webmaster tools, all of the parameters Google had found were there already. I went through and edited them and added the new information.
-
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
-
I need help on how best to do a complicated site migration. Replacing certain pages with all new content and tools, and keeping the same URL's. The rest just need to disappear safely. Somehow.
I'm completely rebranding a website but keeping the same domain. All content will be replaced and it will use a different theme and mostly new plugins. I've been building the new site as a different site in Dev mode on WPEngine. This means it currently has a made-up domain that needs to replace the current site. I know I need to somehow redirect the content from the old version of the site. But I'm never going to use that content again. (I could transfer it to be a Dev site for the current domain and automatically replace it with the click of a button - just as another option.) What's the best way to replace blahblah.com with a completely new blahblah.com if I'm not using any of the old content? There are only about 4 URL'st, such as blahblah.com/contact hat will remain the same - with all content replaced. There are about 100 URL's that will no longer be in use or have any part of them ever used again. Can this be done safely?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brickbatmove1 -
Link juice through URL parameters
Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Why do Local "5 pack" results vary between showing Google+, Google+ and website address
I had a client ask me a good question. When they pull up a search result they show up at the top but only with a link to their G+ page. Other competitors show their web address and G+ page. Why are these results different in the same search group? Is there a way to ensure the web address shows up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron_McCabe0 -
Https & http urls in Google Index
Hi everyone, this question is a two parter: I am now working for a large website - over 500k monthly organic traffic. The site currently has both http and https urls in Google's index. The website has not formally converted to https. The https began with an error and has evolved unchecked over time. Both versions of the site (http & https) are registered in webmaster tools so I can clearly track and see that as time passes http indexation is decreasing and https has been increasing. The ratio is at about 3:1 in favor of https at this time. Traffic over the last year has slowly dipped, however, over the last two months there has been a steady decline in overall visits registered through analytics. No single page appears to be the culprit, this decline is occurring across most pages of the website, pages which traditionally draw heavy traffic - including the home page. Considering that Google is giving priority to https pages, could it be possible that the split is having a negative impact on traffic as rankings sway? Additionally, mobile activity for the site has steadily increased both from a traffic and a conversion standpoint. However that traffic has also dipped significantly over the last two months. Looking at Google's mobile usability error's page I see a significant number of errors (over 1k). I know Google has been testing and changing mobile ranking factors, is it safe to posit that this could be having an impact on mobile traffic? The traffic declines are 9-10% MOM. Thank you. ~Geo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geosem0 -
Site's disappearnce in web rankings
I'm currently doing some work on a website: http://www.abetterdriveway.com.au. Upon starting, I detected a lot of spammy links going to this website and sort to remove them before submitting a disavow report. A few months later, this site completely disappeared in the rankings, with all keywords suddenly not ranked. I realised that the test website (which was put up to view before the new site went live) was still up on another URL and Google was suddenly ranking that site instead. Hence, I ensured that test site was completely removed. 3 weeks later however, the site (www.abetterdriveway.com.au) still remains unranked for its keywords. Upon checking Web Master Tools, I cannot see anything that stands out. There is no manual action or crawling issues that I can detect. Would anyone know the reason for this persistent disappearance? Is it something I will just have to wait out until ranking results come back, or is there something I am missing? Help here would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Google Maps Integration Dynamic url
We are integrating Google Maps into a search feature on a website. Would you use the standard dynamic generated long url that appears after a search or find a way of reducing this to a shorter url. Taking into account hundreds of results. Question asked for seo purposes.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide0 -
Questions about Vittana.org's blogging contest and having bloggers use specific anchor text.
Hi All, Kenji Crosland here. I just joined vittana.org (yesterday!) to do some of the blogger outreach and content creation/link building. Although most of the links we've gotten in the past are branded links, we've decided to actively pursue anchor text links with specific keywords. If you check, you'll see that vittana has a relatively high domain authority. At the beginning of next week we'll be conducting a blogging contest with A-list celebrity tech bloggers. I don't think we'll have time to contact influencers in other areas for this contest unfortunately. When these A-list bloggers write their posts, we want them to have a link to this page: http://www.vittana.org/students To me, this seems a great opportunity to win on certain keywords we've discovered that should be easy to win and yet have a high volume of monthly searches. These are 5 word plus keywords that have over 300,000 searches per month. The students page, however, isn't optimized for those keywords. In the long run we want to win for the more difficult keyword "literacy". The word "literacy" is what we think will be a part of our new tagline: "Literacy is not enough". Because of time constraints, we won't be able to create landing pages to win for those "low hanging fruit" keywords in time for the blog contest. My question is: to what extent should we optimize the http://www.vittana.org/students page for the five word plus low hanging fruit keywords that we've discovered. I imagine if the content isn't relevant our clickthrough rates will suffer even if we do win for it (Altering our meta description is a possibility here) . Should we just try for the difficult keyword from the get go and come up with other ways to win for the low hanging fruit keywords? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vittana_seo0 -
DCMI and Google's rich snippets
I haven't seen any consistent information regarding DCMI tags for organic SEO in a couple of years. Webmaster Tools obviously has a rich set of instructions for microdata. Has there been any updated testing on DCMI or information above the whisper/rumor stage on whether engines will be using Dublin? As a final point, would it be worth going back to static pages that haven't been touched in a couple of years and updating them with microdata? It seems a natural for retail sites and maybe some others, but what about content heavy pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyseo0