How to stop UTM affecting SEO
-
Dear Moz community,
We are a directory website and have lots and lots of UTM. This is crucial as we want to measure visits through Google analytics.
Moz as a tool is fantastic because through a site crawl it can spot all our duplicate pages. Needless to say, due to the amount of UTM's on different pages, we have lots of duplicate pages flagged up. I ideal solution is still having the analytics capabilities of the UTM, but not affecting our SEO where search engines will realise it is not a duplicate page - we're aware it is the same page we just want to track the source!
Your help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Eric -
@loganray I came across this post and wanted to confirm that the information/recommendations/instructions are not outdated as the post it self, is a bit old. Thanks for your help.
-
Hi Logan,
Thank you for the practical suggestions! Will speak to the team about putting these things in action!
Eric
-
Eric,
Add the following lines to your robots.txt file and you should be good to go. This will prevent Moz (aka RogerBot) from crawling and reporting on URLs that are tagged with UTMs:
User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*?utmYou should also add self-referring canonical tags on these pages, which will prevent multiple versions of the same page from being indexed. For example:
http://www.yoursite.com/some-page?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social should have a canonical tag that looks like this:
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
-
International SEO - Hreflang tags and URL Structure
Hello, I wonder if any SEO internationalisation experts can help. We are a UK centric business with a .com domain which all our traffic currently goes to. We have been growing in the US and are therefore looking to internationalise our website by building out some US pages using the subfolder .com/us. Since the keywords we wish to target in the US are different to the keywords we are targeting elsewhere, when implementing hreflang tags is it possible to use a different URL for the US page? So let’s say we are targeting ‘estate car’ generally but want to target ’station wagon’ as the keyword for the equivalent US page, can the URLs be different? Example: General page: www.example.com/estate-car US: www.example.com/us/station-wagon Hreflang tags: Would that be the correct implementation? Any help or guidance would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEOCT0 -
Is Removing Breadcrumbs Detrimental for SEO?
We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu. i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops) Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
SEO for Parallax Website
Hi, Are there any implications of having a parallax website and the URL not changing as you scroll down the page? So basically the whole site is under the same URL? However, when you click on the menu the URL does change? Cheers
Technical SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
SEO impact of overseas data center
Hi there, I currently host a number of sites from data centers in the UK and Hong Kong but now have the need to develop a site specifically for an Australian audience. While our server in Hong Kong can probably provide an acceptably fast service to Australia i'm concerned that its location outside of Australia will negatively affect our local SEO efforts. Am i right to be concerned about this? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Dave
Technical SEO | | evidentlydavidm0 -
Planing Seo For New Seo
Hello; I have the domain which registerd in 2006 and i opened website 1 months ago and i start to do some seo like bought links pr1-pr7 50 links and 2500 social bookmarks 2000 blog links and also some wiki links am i doing good or bad ?
Technical SEO | | Sadullah0 -
Does a CDN affect search rankings?
I feel kind of stupid asking this, but if i use one it would speed things up quite a bit. It is for a ecommerce website, any guidance on this would be awesome!
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0 -
301 Redirects - SEO Benefit?
Hello, Years ago, our company started out as a Yahoo store. We've since moved onto another website with its own shopping cart but since the Yahoo store is almost 10 years old, there's a lot of history there and it still exists with the occasional order. We currently use it for reputation management purposes with links to our real ecommerce site but we're thinking of just redirecting the Yahoo store to our ecommerce site. Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? We were also kind of penalized by Panda. Would this help us out at all (the descriptions on both sites could be considered duplicate content).
Technical SEO | | airnwater0 -
Best Joomla SEO Extensions?
My website is a Joomla based website. My designer is good, but I don't think he knows that much about SEO . . . so I doubt if he added any extensions that can assist with SEO. I assume there are some good ones that can help my site. Does anyone know what/which Joomla extensions are must haves?
Technical SEO | | damon12120