Static URL

Tracking parameter

Reordering parameter

Identifying parameter

Searching parameter

Crawling redundant parameter pages drains crawl budget, reducing your site’s ability to index SEO relevant pages and increasing server load.

If you have multiple permutations of the same page content, links and social shares may be coming in on various versions. This dilutes your ranking signals. When you confuse a crawler, it becomes unsure which of the competing pages to index for the search query.

Parameter URLs are unsightly. They’re hard to read. They don’t seem as trustworthy. As such, they are less likely to be clicked.

With a tool like Screaming Frog you can search for “?” in the URL.

Google auto-adds the query strings it finds.

See if Googlebot is crawling parameter-based URLs.

Know how Google is indexing the parameters you found by putting the key in a site:example.com inurl:key combination query.

Search for “?” to see how each of the parameters you found are used by users. Be sure to check that URL query parameters have not been excluded in the view setting.

1. Eliminate Unnecessary Parameters

2. Prevent Empty Values

3. Use Keys Only Once

4. Order URL Parameters

Pros

Cons

The rel=”canonical” link attribute calls out that a page has identical or similar content to another. This encourages search engines to consolidate the ranking signals to the URL specified as canonical.

Pros

Cons

Set a noindex directive for any parameter based page that doesn’t add SEO value. This tag will prevent search engines from indexing the page.URLs with a “noindex” tag are also likely to be crawled less frequently and if it’s present for a long time will eventually lead Google to nofollow the page’s links.

Pros

Cons

The robots.txt file is what search engines look at first before crawling your site. If they see something is disallowed, they won’t even go there. You can use this file to block crawler access to every parameter based URL (with Disallow: /*?*) or only to specific query strings you don’t want to be indexed.

Pros

Cons

Configure Google’s URL parameter tool to tell crawlers the purpose of your parameters and how you would like them to be handled.

Pros

Cons

Many people think the optimal way to handle URL parameters is to simply avoid them in the first place. To achieve this, you can use server-side URL rewrites to convert parameters into subfolder URLs.

URL with parameters: www.example.com/view-product?id=482794

Subfolder URL: www.example.com/widgets/blue

Pros

Cons

If you implement robots.txt disallow, Google would not be able to see any meta noindex tag.

You also shouldn’t combine a meta noindex tag with a rel=canonical link attribute.

Do keyword research to understand what parameters should be search engine friendly, static URLs.

Implement correct pagination handling with rel=”next & rel=”prev”.

For all remaining parameter-based URLs, implement consistent ordering rules, which use keys only once and prevent empty values to limit the number of URLs.

Add a rel=canonical link attribute to suitable parameter pages to combine ranking ability.

Configure URL parameter handling in both Google and Bing as a failsafe to help search engines understand each parameter’s function.

Double check that no parameter-based URLs are being submitted in the XML sitemap.