Does "?" in my URL have a negative effect?
-
I am having a difficult time finding specific information about the effect, if any, having a ? within the URL structure. We have the descriptive keyword phrase followed by the ? location id as in this example:
http://www.adventuresonly.com/adventure-locations/things-to-do-in-arizona?stateid=124
Any feedback on effect and a corrective process to improve if necessary would be appreciated!
-
The question mark sign signals the beggining of URL parameters. This will not impact your keyword however if the URL parameters do not significantly alter the content of you page then this could cause duplicate content issues as Search engines will see each parameter variation as a unique URL.
Search engines will try to identify these but to help them out you should Discount URL parameters in Webmaster tools for the respective search engine (Not just Google), and to avoid link equity being lost or dilluted implementing the Rel=cannonical tag to the page and referenceing back to a sensible root page version will mean all your inbound links work together.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Product Subdomain Outranking "Marketing" Domains
Hello, Moz community! I have been puzzling about what to do for a client. Here is the challenge. The client's "product"/welcome page lives at www.client.com this page allows the visitor to select the country/informational site they want OR to login to their subdomain/install of the product. Google is choosing this www.client.com url as the main result for client brand searches. In a perfect world, for searchers in the US, we would get served the client's US version of the information/marketing site which lives at https://client.com/us, and so on for other country level content (also living in a directory for that country) It's a brand new client, we've done geo-targeting within the search console, and I'm kind of scared to rock the boat by de-indexing this www.client.com welcome screen. Any thoughts, ideas, potential solutions are so appreciated. THANKS! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
International URL Structures
Hi everyone! I've read a bunch of articles on the topic, but I can't seem to be able to figure out a solution that works for the specific case. We are creating a site for a service agency, this agency has offices around the world - the site has a global version (in English/French & Spanish) and some country specific versions. Here is where it gets tricky: in some countries, each office has a different version of the site and since we have Canada for example we have a French and an English version of the site. For cost and maintenance reason, we want to have a single domain : www.example.com We want to be able to indicate via Search Console that each subdomain is attached to a different country, but how should we go about it. I've seen some examples with subfolders like this: Global FR : www.example.com/fr-GL Canada FR: www.example.com/fr-ca France: www.example.com/fr-fr Does this work? It seems to make more sense to use : **Subdirectories with gTLDs, **but I'm not sure how that would work to indicate the difference between my French Global version vs. France site. Global FR : www.example.com/fr France : www.example.com/fr/fr Am I going about this the right way, I feel the more I dig into the issue, the less it seems there is a good solution available to indicate to Google which version of my site is geo-targeted to each country. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | sarahcoutu150 -
Google Webmaster Tools is saying "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt" after Https move...
Hi Everyone, I really don't see anything wrong with our robots.txt file after our https move that just happened, but Google says all URLs are blocked. The only change I know we need to make is changing the sitemap url to https. Anything you all see wrong with this robots.txt file? robots.txt This file is to prevent the crawling and indexing of certain parts of your site by web crawlers and spiders run by sites like Yahoo! and Google. By telling these "robots" where not to go on your site, you save bandwidth and server resources. This file will be ignored unless it is at the root of your host: Used: http://example.com/robots.txt Ignored: http://example.com/site/robots.txt For more information about the robots.txt standard, see: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html For syntax checking, see: http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html Website Sitemap Sitemap: http://www.bestpricenutrition.com/sitemap.xml Crawlers Setup User-agent: * Allowable Index Allow: /*?p=
Technical SEO | | vetofunk
Allow: /index.php/blog/
Allow: /catalog/seo_sitemap/category/ Directories Disallow: /404/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /magento/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /var/ Paths (clean URLs) Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /control/
Disallow: /contacts/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customize/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /poll/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wishlist/
Disallow: /aitmanufacturers/index/view/
Disallow: /blog/tag/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/abuse/reportajax/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/ajaxproduct/
Disallow: /advancedreviews/proscons/checkbyproscons/
Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/
Disallow: /productquestions/index/ajaxform/ Files Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /STATUS.txt Paths (no clean URLs) Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /?SID=
disallow: /?cat=
disallow: /?price=
disallow: /?flavor=
disallow: /?dir=
disallow: /?mode=
disallow: /?list=
disallow: /?limit=5
disallow: /?limit=10
disallow: /?limit=15
disallow: /?limit=20
disallow: /*?limit=250 -
Our rankings for "Tree Service" dropped last month
Hi, we've had a page www.savatree.com/tree-service.html which was ranking top 1-12 on the google rankings but has complete dropped out. We don't have any duplicate errors from that page on here. Do you have any suggestions? We do rank highly on Bing and Yahoo (1-2 pages). We can't figure whats going on.
Technical SEO | | SavATree0 -
What is the best practice to seperate different locations and languages in an URL? At the moment the URL is www.abc.com/ch/de. Is there a better way to structure the URL from an SEO perspective?
I am looking for a solution for using a new URL structure without using www.abc.com**/ch/de** in the URL to deliver the right languages in specific countries where more than one language are spoken commonly. I am looking forward to your ideas!
Technical SEO | | eviom0 -
"Not Selected" in index status rising continously
Hello, After the penguin update my site slowly suffered loss in traffic. and now from daily 15K-18K its droped to 8K. (6K in weekends) I have been trying to find out what the reasons are but i havent got any good luck yet been few months now. I noticed this change in the GWT tho : Not selected in index status significantly risen up. please see attached image. My site is Designzzz i am continously fixing errors and problems shown in the seomoz pro tools. If you guys can take few mins to evaluate what could be the reason for such drop i will be thankful :} cheers 6Xtkp.jpg
Technical SEO | | wickedsunny10 -
How many steps for a 301 redirect becomes a "bad thing"
OK, so I am not going to worry now about being a purist with the htaccess file, I can't seem to redirect the old pages without redirect errors (project is an old WordPress site to a redesigned WP site). And the new site has a new domain name; and none of the pages (except the blog posts) are the same. I installed the Simple 301 redirects plugin on old site and it's working (the Redirection plugin looks very promising too, but I got a warning it may not be compatible with the old non-supported theme and older v. of WP). Now my question using one of the redirect examples (and I need to know this for my client, who is an internet marketing consultant so this is going to be very important to them!): Using Redirect Checker, I see that http://creativemindsearchmarketing.com/blog --- 301 redirects to http://www.creativemindsearchmarketing.com/blog --- which then 301 redirects to final permanent location of http//www.cmsearchmarketing.com/blog How is Google going to perceive this 2-step process? And is there any way to get the "non-www-old-address" and also the "www-old-address" to both redirect to final permanent location without going through this 2-stepper? Any help is much appreciated. _Cindy
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0 -
How can i redirect a url that has % in it?
Google webmaster tools shows a 400 eroor for an old link that contains a 30% off in it. The problem is the % I would like to 301 redirect this link : http://www.geographics.com/Graduation-Stationery,-35%-OFF-Printable-Certificates-Blank-Gift-Certificates/c1353_1354_1359/index.html to http://www.geographics.com/Graduation-Stationery-Printable-Certificates-Blank-Gift-Certificates/c1353_1354_1359/index.html We do not know how to do this in httaccess. Can you please advise? Thanks a lot! Madlena
Technical SEO | | Madlena0