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@loganray I came across this post and wanted to confirm that the information/recommendations/instructions are not outdated as the post it self, is a bit old.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
-
Does anyone know if an increase in 804 HTTPS errors will affect SEO rankings?
We recently moved our whole site over from HTTP to HTTPS and we went from having 106 keywords in the top 3 positions to 80 in just one week. The only thing that I can think of that caused the drop is the HTTPS changes to our site. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SimonWorsfold0 -
Is this type of navigation SEO friendly?
Hi mozzers, I wanted to know if this type of navigation SEO friendly. Is it better than the regular drop down menu navigation? Thanks! Ug4MhZw.png
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Should i put an introduction on my site for better seo
Hi, my site is www.in2town.co.uk and we have been having serious problems with our site since our upgrade. Before the upgrade, our site was on the first page of google for many years and most of them we were in the top three, now however since the upgrade of our site we have had serious problems. The main keyword for our site was lifestyle magazine, but now after checking this keyword we are now on page 12, this has gone down over the past couple of days. we had an introduction and information about our magazine on the home page, trying to rank for the keyword lifestyle magazine, we were jumping from page nine to six to ten, we took the intro off as a developer said that we had done enough to rank well for the keyword without putting any text with the keyword on our site, but since taking it off, we have dropped down more in the rankings. I would love to hear from people on their thoughts on this and if we should put back the intro at the top or where they feel we should put it and should we put about the magazine at the bottom. I was always taught, if you want to rank well for a keyword then as well as doing all the linking, you also need to make sure you optimize the page with the keyword looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Update page for better SEO score?
Hi, Is it important to update a page sometimes to score better in SEO?
Technical SEO | | parfumerienl
Or if i make a page and never change it, it would be good enough.0 -
What price should you pay for seo services
A friend of mine has a business site and he has said to me that he has been receiving a number of emails with regards to seo services. He is seriously thinking about using a company to help him as he does not have the time to promote his site and get it in the top of the search engines. Last week he asked me what price should he be paying for a small business site and to be honest i could not give him an answer as i have never used a company who deal with seo before. A lot of the emails he has received are from India, and i would like to know what is involved, do they need access inside your site and what price is a good price to pay. Normally i would have told him to learn seo himself but due to the lack of time he has i can understand why he needs a company to help him any help would be good
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
On-Page SEO of the SEOmoz Blog Section
Hey Everyone My brain isn't working (only had 1 cup of coffee so far - #2 on it's way) this morning and I could use some help. We're creating a blog on a site for a client of ours and I've been looking at the SEOmoz blog for best practices when it comes to the implementation of pagination, canonical tags and noindex. My questions: There is no use of the canonical tag on the main blog page or any of the paginated pages but it is being used on blog post pages. Why not use it on the main blog pages as well? I'm assuming because the blog pages are always changing with different content there is not much point? Paginated pages in the category sections i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1?page=2 are noindexed but paginated pages in the main blog section i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 are not. Is this because of a duplicate content concern since the posts in the category sections are in the main blog section as well? If that's the case, why wouldn't the main category page i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1 be noindexed as well? What's the reason for noindexing the "Show # Posts" pages i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog?show=5 ? I'm assuming another concern of duplicate content? Any insights into these questions would be greatly appreciated and would help with the implementation of our clients blog. Thanks, Ken
Technical SEO | | noBulMedia0 -
Advice on SEO for videos on a streaming server
I am looking for some advice on video SEO when the video file is housed on a streaming server. An example page is below. The onlyvideo element on the page is a script reading in the filepath to the streaming server so I am not sure what the best course of action is. Currently, none of our videos are indexed. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/webinars/Making-Agile-Work-for-You.cfm
Technical SEO | | SEI0 -
How does a mega drop-down affects SEO?
We are looking at implementing a "mega drop-down" as our main menu on our website. Will that be good or bad for SEO? My company is a big tour operator so our website contains a lot of pages describing all our destinations, hotels etc. We have noticed that our visitors have some trouble to navigate to all this pages since it requires a lot of clicks to reach a specific page. In order to make this easier we have looked at this popular mega drop-down thing that we all love. But what about Google? Will Google love or hate us for doing this? An example showing what I mean by mega drop-down: http://www.phonehouse.se/
Technical SEO | | Googleankan0