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
-
Visits from Google with ccTLD are showing as referrals
Hi!I was seeing on of my clients Analytics report and it shows that some of the main sites that send visits and get tagged as referral traffic are google.com.br, google.cl, google.com.ar, among others. Do you know why is this happening? Shouldn't they get tagged by default as organic?
Reporting & Analytics | | arielbortz0 -
How can I easily combine moz page difficulty, google search volume and SERPS position?
I want to produce an excel spreadsheet that I can use to identify the best use of my content Writing time. So Looking at a keyword list I want Current SERPS to show me where I am now? moz page difficulty score to show how hard I'll have to work google traffic estimate so that I can see the potential payoff. I can can generate all these separately but combining them is a huge time waster as invariably the results don't come back in quiet the same order and a line by line check is required. Part of the reason for doing this is keyword exploration so that we can find new niches by generating hundreds or thousands of keywords to test.
Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Google Analytics showing discrepancy in Geo data
My site is related to UAE and the Gulf region. An year ago, Google Analytics abruptly started showing high incoming traffic from USA (Visits grew from 50k/month to 500k/month) while the overall traffic was stagnant. An year down the line, this has now been reverted back to normal nos and the overall traffic is still maintained. What could be a possible explanation for this discrepancy? Since this reversal has also now boosted traffic nos for other countries, should we rely on this data? Or is it polluted?
Reporting & Analytics | | vivekrathore0 -
Webmaster Tools, why does it show 486 pages submitted to web, and only 40 indexed?
I am confused on what a client account shows in WMTs, client account is http://multiview.com. They have a graph showing 486 pages submitted to web, but only 40 are indexed. Also, they recently re-launched, i.e in April 2014, and the new site has about 40 pages indexed.... so I am guessing that the 486 number relates to all the pages that are showing errors in retrieving...i.e. 28 soft 404 errors, 10 access denied errors, 808 not found errors. Does this make sense to explain why there is such a gap between 486 and 40?
Reporting & Analytics | | DianeDP0 -
Rising in Bing and Yahoo SERP's, but falling in Googles?
We've dropped rankings across the board in Google, not severely but 1 and 2 spot drops and yet increased in rankings in Bing and Yahoo on the same keywords (basically all of them). Is this the sign of a new bad incoming link?
Reporting & Analytics | | absoauto0 -
Why seomoz shows me "missing meta discription" on this plugin: http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/plugins/dopbsp/frontend-ajax.php ? Should I edit? how?? IIs it posible??
Good day to all! I am very confuse about results on seomoz Crawl Diagnostics Summary, especially with 6 Crawl Warnings Found. It says title too short: http://villasdiani.com/category/mombasa/, http://villasdiani.com/category/watamu/ , http://villasdiani.com/sitemap/ why would Google punish me for this??? why should I make longer title for sitemap? or Watamu? It is the name of the place - Watamu or Mombasa. It is very confusing for me. I have very big mess with the website and it is not ranking:-( what I have done:-( and is it possible to meta description for this plugin: http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/plugins/dopbsp/frontend-ajax.php how?? I even do not know where is it.
Reporting & Analytics | | VillasDiani0 -
Webmaster Tools shows 0 visits, Analytics shows 1000s?
Webmaster Tools reported a "Big traffic change for top URL" for one of our sites about three and a half weeks ago. WT traffic is 0 since that date. However, our analytics data shows no significant decline in traffic. The WT alert was received on Nov. 16. There was a significant dip in GA visits Nov. 22 but it recovered and I'm seeing no other indication that this is a penalty. What could be going on?
Reporting & Analytics | | IMM0 -
Webmaster Tools Showing Non-Existent Rankings
Hello World(pun intended) I am seeing a phenomenal keyword phrase ranking at an avg. 9.9 on google webmaster tools but not actually seeing the ranking in reality. If i did I would be rich. Does this mean I will soon see this ranking?
Reporting & Analytics | | TheGrid0