How to prevent channel identifiers from showing up in the SERPs?
-
We append our urls with channel identifiers (?cid) to help us analyze where traffic is coming from. Recently, our appended urls with channel identifiers are showing up in the SERPs. How can we stop this from happening and prevent in the future? Has anyone had similar issues?
-
Ugh, yeah, I definitely don't like seeing those parameters indexed. Reaching out to the Moz team to see if anyone has used Adobe Experience Manager. If it weren't a CMS or analytics setup issue, I do think rel=canonical would be a good fit here, but it's possible there are better setup options for the product that I'm not aware of. Once they're indexed, though, it's typically going to mean rel=canonical or a redirect to get rid of them. You could use Google Search Console, but they've pulled back a lot of the parameter handling options (at least temporarily) in the new version.
-
We use Adobe Experience Manager
-
For example, if you google Morningstar Direct, the first organic search results include ?cid=RED_DIR0001. As you scroll through the search results, there are other instances of this happening.
-
Yeah, you may have options in your CMS. Challenge at this point is that those URLs are already indexed, so if you change your CMS settings to use a different kind of identifier (again, we're being very fuzzy on details) you may still need a solution to de-index those URLs.
-
What platform do you use for your website / shop? there can be other and more easy ways to correct this than the re-cononical.
But like Dr. Peter J. Meyers asks, need abit more information / link or something to help you with the best solution for youre current platform
-
There are a couple of ways to go about it, but this is a situation where the rel-canonical tag is probably your best bet. It'll attribute all of those URLs back to the parent URL, set up correctly. If you can provide some specifics (or even a semi-fictional example), I can try to give you more guidance.
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
-
Google Analytic showing Bounce Rate More than 100% i.e. 2000%, 3000% Bounces for Many Pages
Hello Guys, Google Analytic showing Bounce Rate More than 100% i.e. 2000%, 3000% etc for Many Pages. Can anyone let me know what is the issue? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | dsouzac0 -
How does Google Maps/G+ traffic show up in Analytics?
Hi Moz Community, I've been trying to figure out how traffic from Google Maps (and G+) shows up in Google Analytics and am struggling to find a good answer online. If someone finds a business through Google Maps and then clicks on the website in the Maps listing, does that show up as a referral from Google Maps? Our site shows virtually zero traffic from Google Maps even though we have a number of listing. Two related questions: if someone clicks through to a G+ page from a Maps result and then visits our website from the G+ page, does that show up in Analytics as a referral from G+? Is traffic from Google Maps or G+ ALSO counted as organic traffic? (Would it be possible to accidentally double-count a visit as both organic and a referral from Maps/G+? Thanks everybody!
Reporting & Analytics | | JohnGroves0 -
Google Analytics Goal/Event/SOMETHING to show only Wordpress "Posts", not pages, etc
Hi all, Our site is build on Wordpress and formerly the post URL's had the typical date format at the beginning. This made it easy for me to look at, for example, all search traffic to the blog. I would just view URL's containing /2014/ and /2015/ and boom. We have since removed the dates from the URL's with proper redirects etc, which is great, but now I can't figure out a way to look at ONLY the blog in GA. I like to track a KPI of 'search visits to blog posts' and I can't figure out how to now. Can I set up a GA event that only fires when the post type template for blog posts loads? Some other solution? I'm lost here, and there's gotta be a good way to do it...
Reporting & Analytics | | 3DR0 -
What are some good SERP visibility tools?
With keyword data from Google on its way out, we're losing our ability to discover what keywords a website is ranking for (you can do ranking checks, but only if you already know what keywords the site is ranking for). What are some good SERP visibility tools? (i.e. you enter the domain name, and the tool lists which keywords the site ranks for organically, etc.) I know SpyFu offers this, but they seem to be PPC focused and perhaps not very accurate. I know other companies offer it, but I'm blanking on which ones.
Reporting & Analytics | | AdamThompson0 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Show item status in GA - LIve vs sold vs unsold
Hi guys, I am working with SEO for an auction site with B2C and C2C. (similar to eBay) All item\products on our page have an unique url. The auction can last from hours to weeks.
Reporting & Analytics | | helgeolaussen
When the item is live, sold or (finished but)unsold it still has the same url.
So when I take a look at SEO traffic to items in Google Analytics, I can't tell if the item was live, sold or unsold at the time the user landed on the page. Which makes it diffucult to analyse the traffic. Is there anyway I can make GA show the status of the item for the time user landed on it? Best regards, Ceran0 -
No Link Data Available for this URL appears often. Are my sites too small to show up?
I am on the trial until Mar 5, 2012. I seldom get the info I want. Is it because my sites are too narrow a niche? I don't seem to be getting the data I'd like from your service. I'm trying to like it, but when I keep getting messages like this, it makes it hard to justify: "No Link Data Available for this URL appears often" Sample sites that I am unable to get data. I especially would like to know how many backlinks exist for each site. I paid someone to help me with them and I'd like to verify their work.: http://costaricadentistreview.com/ http://costaricadentistreviews.com/ http://costaricadentalimplants.org Any suggestions? Thanx Kurt Gross
Reporting & Analytics | | kurtray0 -
Want to link to GA profile, but the one I want is not showing in drop-down
How can I manually add the correct Google Analytics data in to my account? The two options I see on the drop-down are not the ones I want to select and I don't see a way to do it manually. Help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Uniqueson0