Will a "blog=example "parameter at the end of my URLs affect google's crawling them?
-
For example, I'm wondering if www.example.com/blog/blog-post is better than www.example.com/blog/blog-post?blog=example?
I'm currently using the www.example.com/blog/blog-post?blog=example structure as our canonical page for content.
I'm also wondering, if the parameter doesn't affect crawling, if it would hurt rankings in any way.
Thanks!
-
Thank you Ryan! Sounds like I should be using the cleaner format.
-
Google is capable of crawling almost any URL. I am certain the URL would be crawled in either format.
With respect to rankings, a cleaner URL would be preferred. URLs are a ranking factor, but not a big one. Even so, you want to remove any unnecessary terms from the URL, and especially repeated terms.
Additionally, cleaner URLs are more readable by people so will likely experience better Click Through Rates. While not a ranking factor, it does directly affect your traffic.
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
-
Is there an easy way to hide one of your URL's on google search?, rather than redirecting?
We don't want to redirect to a different page, as some people still use it, we just don't want it to appear in search
Technical SEO | | TheIDCo0 -
Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko
Technical SEO | | Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie0 -
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Please advise.
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Are there any other precautions I should be taking? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Redirect old URL's from referring sites?
Hi I have just came across some URL's from the previous web designer and the site structure has now changed. There are some links on the web however that are still pointing at the old deep weblinks. Without having to contact each site it there a way to automatically sort the links from the old structure www.mydomain.com/show/english/index.aspx to just www.mydomain.com Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Trying to get on Google page one for keyword "criminal defense attorney san diego". What can I do?
I'm trying to help a friend who is an attorney get on page one for the keyword "criminal defense attorney san diego." So far I've changed his title and description tags since they weren't optimized before. (SERP shows old title tag, however I submitted a XML sitemap through Webmaster tools to get the new title tags updated.) He also had a few duplicate pages, but I took care of that with some 301 redirects. I also added a h1 tag, alt image tag, and more content. I also spent a few hours building links for him. He currently has a page authority of 52 and domain authority of 44 with a decent amount of links pointing to his site. I'm wondering why he's stuck on page 4, when his competitors that have less impressive numbers seem to show up on page 1. I did look at his link profile using OSE and I'm worried that his old SEO guy got him spam links. His website is www.nasserilegal.com, however the page I was focusing on was www.nasserilegal.com/criminal.html Any advice would be great.
Technical SEO | | micasalucasa0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
Slash at end of URL causing Google crawler problems
Hello, We are having some problems with a few of our pages being crawled by Google and it looks like the slash at the end of the URL is causing the problem. Would appreciate any pointers on this. We have a redirect in place that redirects the "no slash" URL to the "slash" URL for all pages. The obvious solution would be to try turning this off, however, we're unable to figure our where this redirect is coming from. There doesn't appear to be an instruction in our .htaccess file doing this, and we've also tried using "DirectorySlash Off" in the .htaccess file, but that doesn't work either. (if it makes a difference it is a 302 redirect doing this, not a 301) If we can't get the above to work, then the other solution would be to somehow reconfigure the page so that it is recognizable with the slash at the end by Google. However, we're not sure how this would be done. I think the quickest solution would be to turn off the "add slash" redirect. Any ideas on where this command might be hiding, and how to turn it off would be greatly appreciated. Or any tips from people who have had similar crawl problems with google and any workarounds would be great! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onetwentysix0 -
How do I 301 url's with numbers in them?
I have a number of 404 error pages showing in webmaster tools and some of the url's have numbers, % symbols, and some are pdf's. My usual 301 redirect in my htaccess file does NOT redirect these pages where the url's have special characters. What am I doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0