Duplicate content issue with ?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=

[Dinsh007]

Hello,
Recently, I was checking how my site content is getting indexed in Google and from today I noticed 2 links indexed on google for the same article:

This is the proper link - https://techplusgame.com/hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims/

But why this URL was indexed, I don't know - https://techplusgame.com/hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims

Could you please tell me how to solve this issue? Thank you

[dotemna]

Hi @Dinsh007!
I usually exclude such pages with parameters in robots.txt file.

[Paktas]

We are also having the same issue with UTM tags in SERPS:
?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=some-article-title

We have canonicals in place, but google still decides to show this. It's ok - google can decide on this if the links are from respective sources... well, we can't find those sources - checked search console, searched ahrefs. nothing.
We are using RSS to feed Google Publisher Center, but it does not have RSS values for links.
We are close to disabling our global website feed to get rid of non-canonical links on SERPs.

[Dinsh007]

Thank you very much for so many solutions, I will implement it if I see any issues again and bookmarking this page also.

Regards
Dinesh Singh

[Paddy_Moogan]

YoastSEO should do the job for Wordpress - it allows you to define the canonical page URL on each of your pages/posts:

https://yoast.com/help/canonical-urls-in-wordpress-seo/

Another option which I usually find effective which I initially skipped over is the URL parameters section in Google Search Console. You'll find it in the legacy tools section and you can set these parameters to "No: Doesn't affect page content:" which is the option for tracking code parameters:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080548?hl=en

[Dinsh007]

Hello Paddy,

Thank you very much for your reply.

It seems that now the issue is gone but if it happens in future, then is there any Wordpress plugin to resolve this issue, instead of manually messing up with the scripts. Thank you.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

This is quite a common issue and happens because technically, the addition of those parameters at the end of the URL mean that it's a new URL from Google's perspective. These kinds of parameters are very common and Google often figure it out and drop these URLs from their index and focus on the correct version. However, they don't always do this and may not do it as quickly as you'd like.

One way to deal with this is to add a rel=canonical tag to any duplicate versions of the URL and have that tag point back to the correct URL. Based on your question, this would mean that the canonical tag would look like this:

This would go into the section of this URL (and any other duplicates):

https://techplusgame.com/hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims

Hope that helps!

Paddy