Query string parameters always bad for SEO?

[landport]

I've recently put some query string parameters into links leading to a 'request a quote' form which auto-fill the 'product' field with the name of the product that is on the referring product page.

E.g.

Red Bicycle product page >>> Link to RFQ form contains '?productname=Red-Bicycle' >>>> form's product field's default value becomes 'Red-Bicycle'

I know url parameters can lead to keyword cannibalisation and duplicate content, we use sub-domains for our language changer. BUT for something like this, am I potentially damaging our SEO?

Appreciate I've not explained this very well. We're using Kentico by the way, so K# macros are a possibility (I use a simple one to fill the form's Default Field).

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

No, I would make sure it's the best use case for you. Sometimes you can store this data in a cookie. But there are still great ways for just SEO that can help you with making sure that it won't hurt. Usually the best way is still having a canonical tag on the page that matches with the page that the content is originally from.

[landport]

Hi Martijn,

Thanks for the reply. Am I going about this completely the wrong way? Would you recommend using local storage instead?

All the best,

Michael

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Well it would depend on how you set up the data. In the end you can transfer the data from one page to the other in multiple ways (local data storage, cookies, POST). So in most cases you wouldn't even need a parameter like this so you can keep your URLs as clean as possible.

[landport]

Thanks!

I've defined it in Google Search Console and asked it to not be crawled.

It isn't actually for tracking, simply to auto-fill a form for the customer, hopefully to enhance conversions (we sell quite wordy and complex products, some people visit the form, get in a muddle and prefer to ring us than complete the form).

If I was to 301 it back to the original URL, wouldn't that immediately move the user to a URL without the query string?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Parameters are definitely not always a bad thing, if you use them for filtering or pagination they have a great use case. Also for tracking purposes which I think is what you're talking about here it would be fine. But you probably want to put some support in place to make sure you don't mess up your SEO. You have a few ways of doing that:

• Define the URL parameters in Google Search Console, read more about it here.
• In some cases if it's just for tracking purposes but would trigger an actual pageview or 200 status code. Then it might be good to implement a canonical URL that would link back to the original page.
• Robots.txt, way more aggressive but if you don't want search engines to look at the pages at all you can exclude the parameters through the robots.txt. I would advise against using this if you don't have great SEO knowledge.

Hope this was useful!