How to prevent channel identifiers from showing up in the SERPs?

[jmigdal]

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?

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[jmigdal]

We use Adobe Experience Manager

[jmigdal]

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.

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[Jesper-Bak-SEO-specialist]

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

[Dr-Pete]

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.