Do Query Strings strip away SEO value?
-
Hopefully a yes or no answer to this one...
If I have a link pointing to my site as below, is the SEO value stripped away because of the query in the URL?
https://mysite.co.uk/?WT.mc_id=Test
The above mentioned page also has the canonical tag: on it.
-
Hi,
At least not in above case. As you mentioned that you also have rel canonical tag that means you don't want to index query string URL.
Thanks
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
-
SEO rank down 35%
So I recently switched from an Opencart website to a Magento 2 website and my rank has dropped by 35% two weeks later, this is bad news. My old Magento website was 5 years old and was in desperate need of an upgrade, hence the Magento 2 site. I realised today that the canonical URLs on my stores were set to the individual stores as opposed to one store, thus I expect resulting in duplicate content issues (even though Google Webmaster Tools didn't show it). I'm just wondering if anyone else can see something I may be missing? My sites are: thespacecollective.com (primary) thespacecollective.com/us/ (canonical to primary) Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Sitelink Search Box mark-up when multiple query strings are used
Hi all, I'm looking to implement sitelink search box mark-up in Google Tag Manager in JSON-LD format. This would be popped into the Custom HTML tag and would look a little something like: The above option is great if you have one query string for your search term, but what if you had a URL that triggered two query strings - for example: https://www.example.com/search?q=searchterm&category=all Would you need to amend the code something like the below: Any help would be much appreciated! Cheers, Sean
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanginnaw0 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Is tabbed content bad for SEO?
I work for a Theater show listings and ticketing website. In our show listings pages (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/this-is-our-youth_302998/) we split our content into separate tabs (overview, pricing and show dates, cast, and video). Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by separating the content? Are we better served with keeping it all in a single page? Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
A few important mobile SEO questions
I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me. Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version. Questions: 1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge. 2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Retaining SEO value when changing the shopping cart software
I am looking into purchasing an existing ecommerce site with high SEO rankings. However, the site is old and beyond outdated. The shopping cart would need to be updated (say, to Magento). However, an updated shopping cart will force a change in the URLs (from example.com/category.asp to example.com/category). Will the SEO value be lost? Does anyone have any experience with this issue? There is a significant amount of money for me at stake so I would really appreciate to hear your experiences in this matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ywsw0 -
Is CloudFlare bad for SEO?
I have been hit by DDoS attacks lately...not on a huge scale, but probably done by some "script kiddies" or competitors of mine. Still, I need to take some action in order to protect my server and my site against all of this spam traffic that is being sent to it. In the process of researching the tools available for defending a website from a DDoS attack, I came across the service offered by CloudFlare.com. According to the CloudFlare website, they protect your site against a DDoS attack by showing users/visitors they find suspicious an interstitial that asks them if they are a real user or a bot...this interstitial contains a Captcha that suspicious users are asked to enter in order to visit the site. I'm just wondering what kind of an effect such an interstitial could have on my Google rankings...I can imagine that such a thing could add to increased click-backs to the SERPs and, if Google detects this, to lower rankings. Has anyone had experience with the DDoS protection services offered by CloudFlare, who can say a word or two regarding any effects this may have on SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterfish1 -
Need Guidance On SEO Campaign
Hello, my website is www.mybluedish.com and I am launching an SEO campaign to increase our rankings, especially for the keyword 'satellite internet'. We used to be ranked #5 for this keyword and Google made some changes about 9 months ago that dropped us way back. We have recovered a lot back to #18 now, but have been stuck here for a while. I want to step up our SEO campaign and have come up with the following campaign. Could any SEO's please tell me if you think the following is the make up of a solid SEO campaign or if it should be adjusted? Thank you. 12 new blog articles/month 24 Articles submitted to 10 different directories each (total of 200 article directory submissions)/month 1 basic Press Release from PR.com/month 200 do follow blog comments/month 10 paid blog posts (on other people’s blogs of PR 1-5)/month
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0