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@loganray I came across this post and wanted to confirm that the information/recommendations/instructions are not outdated as the post it self, is a bit old.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
-
Display ads and SEO
I have a section(no. of webpages with content) on my site with display ads. The site is mainly for UK visitors. I want to show ads to UK visitors but not US visitors. Rest of the content will be the same for UK and US. There will just be 1 page with same UrL for US and UK. Hence, no href lang tags are being used.
Technical SEO | | Kohliharleen
Is there any correlation between display ads and SEO? Would not showing ads in US cause any issues for bots or do bots consider display ads and SEO as two completey different aspects. Asking as Google bot crawls from the US.1 -
Will I get penalised from an SEO perspective for having redirects.
So we are planning redirect all these https://blue-company.com.au/
Technical SEO | | RodrigoR777
https://www.blue-company.com.au/
http://blue-company.com.au/ to this https://www.bluecompany.com.au/ If we do this, will it have an negative impact on our SEO, is there any downside to this? or get penalised from Google etc?0 -
If few backlinks got deleted how they affect website?
Dear Experts,
Technical SEO | | jfdagborrbg
This is Julia and I am SEO Executive at J com. I would like to ask that If we are building 150+ quality backlinks per month for any website and 30 backlinks are deleting each month from 150 backlinks so It would be OK (natural) OR it would affect website ranking. I am looking forward to your response0 -
Impact of Non SEO Subdomains
My company has several subdomains whose specific purpose is to act as a landing page/site for our paid search and/or email program. One of the things I've noticed on these subdomains is that they are not being excluded from the SEObots. Could the lack of proper SEO techniques on these subdomains impact our main www subdomain? What is the proper configuration we should use to make sure these sites are not considered for SEO?
Technical SEO | | APFM0 -
SEO trending down after adding content to website
Hi
Technical SEO | | swat1827
Looking for some guidance. I added about 14 pages of unique content and did all of the on page SEO work using Yoast - have 'good' status on all of them some of the website architecture was changed - mainly on one page. That being said, we got a significant bump the day I implemented, however every day thereafter we have had very bad results. Worse than we had before for about 3 days now. I did resubmit the updated sitemap to GWT and I'm showing no crawl errors. Also, curious if my Robots.txt file could be the issue. All it contains is User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/ Any insight or advise is greatly appreciated!
Thanks for your time0 -
Will invalid HTML code generated by WordPress affect SEO efforts?
Hi all, I'm new to SEOmoz and SEO in general really. I run a small but well regarded freelance website and graphic design business, and until very recently had an employee who handled the SEO side of things. I'm now looking to step into this role myself and hopefully learn the in's and out's of SEO. I've no doubt there will be much to learn, but the SEOmoz tools and it's community seem excellent and helpful. My question then is basically, if WordPress generated HTML code can have an effect on SEO, when it's reported as invalid by tools such as the W3C HTML validator? I'm used to hand coding the majority of my websites for clients, where creating valid HTML and CSS code is something I can do with relative ease. A new client however wants to use WordPress - for ease of updating the site content themselves. The client does however consider any potential SEO implications to be a very important factor in choosing a hand coded vs. WordPress based website. I am aware that WordPress itself is just a means of generating HTML code, and that to the search engines there is no difference between this and the hand coded websites I usually produce. However if WordPress is generating HTML that is being reported as invalid, would this make the search engines penalise the site? On a second note, will the search engines look negatively on a WordPress site where it is being used as a standard website, and the content may not be updated as frequently, as say, a blog? Thanks for your time, and I look forward to hearing your suggestions.
Technical SEO | | SavilleWolf0 -
seo moz crawl diagnosis
Hi seomozzers, We are creating a brand new website for a client and I would like to run an seo moz crawl to fix what has been done wrong. So my question is it ok to run an SEO moz crawl with a dev URL? Are final URLs and dev URLs will give me the same results or not? Basically, Should I wait for getting the final URL or is it ok to run a crawl under a dev URL such as www.dev2.example.com or http://183.2564.2864? Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
How will a domain change affect my rankings?
My company will undergo a domain change in the next few months. Other than implementing 301 redirects, what else can I do to help the search engines realize the site has moved? What kind of impact on rankings can I expect to see? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | raylau0