Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Reporting & Analytics
    4. Google SERP showing a URL with UTM_source attached - why? Can I stop it?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Google SERP showing a URL with UTM_source attached - why? Can I stop it?

    Reporting & Analytics
    3
    3
    1249
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • DanielleNZ
      DanielleNZ last edited by

      I just found a Google search results page showing a URL with a UTM source tag attached. Any idea how or why this has happened? How can I stop it as I'm guessing this is overwriting my organic visits with referrals from this site.

      See attached photo for pic of SERP page.

      The link is going here: http://employment.govt.nz/er/holidaysandleave/parentalleave/?utm_source=newzealandnow.govt.nz

      5vxTDTi.png

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • TimHolmes
        TimHolmes last edited by

        I believe there are a couple of possible solutions to this.

        1. You could set up canonical tags on the pages that utilise query parameters so that they always point to the parent page.

        Alternatively

        2. You could set it up so that your robots.txt file disallows all query strings, thus preventing them from being indexed. (be careful with this version in case Google cant crawl the original source)

        Disallow: /*?

        it will take however a further crawl from Google before you could see any changes to the indexation of your pages.

        Also in Webmaster tools you have a query parameters section within the Crawl menu. You can add in the variables in order to tell Google how to handle them. Learn more here. Hope this helps.

        Tim

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Alick300
          Alick300 last edited by

          Hi Danielle,

          I have checked from my end but I'm not seeing URL with utm_source, after clicking on search result it is going to http://employment.govt.nz/er/holidaysandleave/parentalleave/

          If you are still seeing the same it means your page is indexed with utm_source you can use rel=canonical on http://employment.govt.nz/er/holidaysandleave/parentalleave/ or you can also use 301 redirect.

          You are not getting correct source because you are searching in Google and showing the page http://employment.govt.nz/er/holidaysandleave/parentalleave/?utm_source=newzealandnow.govt.nz but logically source should be Google not newzealandnow.govt.nz

          Hope this helps.

          Thanks

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          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.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • marshdigitalmarketing

            Tracking PDF downloads from SERP clicks

            For the longest time, our company policy has always been to put PDFs in a secure folder (hence they are not indexed and do not appear in search results). After evaluating this strategy, there has been clamor in recent months to allow Google to index our whitepapers. My question: Once PDFs start appearing in search results, what is the best way to start tracking clicks due to these "downloads"?

            Reporting & Analytics | | marshdigitalmarketing
            0
          • A_Q

            Tasks for Google Analytics training

            Hi Mozzers, I'm delivering some Google Analytics (Fundamentals level) training, and trying to make it was fun and as interesting as possible... which is quite a challenge when it comes to GA. I was just wondering if you're aware of training tasks, or interactions, I could bring into this kind of training session? The group are particularly interested in user journeys and the effectiveness of content. Thanks!

            Reporting & Analytics | | A_Q
            0
          • 3DR

            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 | | 3DR
            0
          • carl_daedricdigital

            Getting google impressions for a site not in the index...

            Hi all Wondering if i could pick the brains of those wise than myself... my client has an https website with tons of pages indexed and all ranking well, however somehow they managed to also set their server up so that non https versions of the pages were getting indexed and thus we had the same page indexed twice in the engine but on slightly different urls (it uses a cms so all the internal links are relative too). The non https is mainly used as a dev testing environment. Upon seeing this we did a google remove request in WMT, and added noindex in the robots and that saw the index pages drop over night. See image 1. However, the site still appears to getting return for a couple of 100 searches a day! The main site gets about 25,000 impressions so it's way down but i'm puzzled as to how a site which has been blocked can appear for that many searches and if we are still liable for duplicate content issues. Any thoughts are most welcome. Sorry, I am unable to share the site name i'm afraid. Client is very strict on this. Thanks, Carl image1.png

            Reporting & Analytics | | carl_daedricdigital
            0
          • henya

            Google Ad referral

            I was wondering if someone could decode the jumble of a referral - this is supposedly the referal that led to a click through to my site via a product listing ad. I am trying to figure out how www.nextag.com comes in to the picture as we do not have refurbexperts even listed there? Thanks to anyone who tries/does work it out. http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CGXud6DmDU_qeL5THygHpuICwCaTZwMYD_Nvvv0bEwMS50wEIBhAEIOn5-gEoBVCl7P7f-v____8BYMnu8omYpPQSoAHAhIv9A8gBB8gDG6oEJ0_QwcNc5zNun_d7S5KNcMT6uPjjH_mMDkKFFgBCQ6aKICRPJVVa7MAFBYgGAaAGJoAHqPv0ApAHAeASupqdo-ypit0m&ohost=www.google.com&cid=5GhZEzUCSC6x9n2wxOdz3-mrAfSUkvHKPN3wD5yLInnlNil_&sig=AOD64_1D1z1JPYbFP0UnUglJVOfvd25RfA&adurl=http://refurbexperts.com/product/527/HP-LaserJet-P2015-Laser-Printer-RECONDITIONED%3Futm_source%3Dproductlistingads%26utm_medium%3Dadwords%26utm_campaign%3Dadwords&ctype=5&nb=0&res_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fhp-p2015-laserjet%2Fproducts-html%3Fnxtg%3D116d0a1c0504-9FFEB16DE52A7E2A&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fgoto.jsp%3Fp%3D3652%26search%3Dhp%2520p2015%2520laserjet%26t%3Dag%253D1384181795%26crid%3D48271786%26gg_aid%3D20169721025%26gg_site%3D%26gclid%3DCjgKEAjwzIucBRDzjIz9qMOB3TASJABBIwL1LHK7GcAPS6yHGpd9Kq3wsZrcPORAWD8QCWivr4W75PD_BwE&nm=11&nx=43&ny=12&is=700x181&clkt=187

            Reporting & Analytics | | henya
            0
          • BoomDialogue69

            How can we view traffic from specific Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit accounts in Google Analytics?

            Dear Moz Community, This is a Google Analytics question. Using Google Analytics, we're trying to identify trends of visitors on a website from specific social media accounts, i.e: twitter.com/account-x facebook.com/account-x youtube.com/account-x reddit.com/r/account-x Ideally, we would like to be able to see the success rate for specific posts on these social media accounts, and how users engaged on the website after arriving from clicking a link on one of these accounts. Is this drill-down feature currently possible in Google Analytics? Many thanks for helping!

            Reporting & Analytics | | BoomDialogue69
            0
          • 10SL

            Google Analytics Organic Search Keywords Suddenly Displaying FulL Urls

            In my Google Analytics, the top keywords for Organic Search are suddenyl displaying full URLs. For example, now the third and fourth keywords are http://www.domain.com/highly-specific-URL. These have all started recently around the same day, July 12th. I've checked back, and we've made no internal changes to the site around that time that could affect this. Any thoughts on this? Thanks! P.S. It might be related to rich snippets, but I cannot tell at this point.

            Reporting & Analytics | | 10SL
            0
          • Resultify

            Google Analytics for multiple languages on multiple domains

            Hi folks A quick question in regards to setting up Google Analytics for a website with multiple languages on multiple domains. The domains that needs to be tracked are: www.example.com -> English www.example.se -> Swedish www.example.dk -> Danish To my best knowledge this can be acheived in Google Analytids using 3 different setups: Different accounts Different properties Profiles What would you guys consider the best approach?
            Pros and cons? Have a great day Fredrik

            Reporting & Analytics | | Resultify
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.