URL Parameters
-
Hi Moz Community,
I'm working on a website that has URL parameters. After crawling the site, I've implemented canonical tags to all these URLs to prevent them from getting indexed by Google. However, today I've found out that Google has indexed plenty of URL parameters..
1-Some of these URLs has canonical tags yet they are still indexed and live.
2- Some can't be discovered through site crawling and they are result in 5xx server error.
Is there anything else that I can do (other than adding canonical tags) + how can I discover URL parameters indexed but not visible through site crawling?
Thanks in advance!
-
I'm also facing the same problem with my website pages. My Blackpods pro website pages don't show the exact permalink urls.
-
Hi there,
Thanks very much for your response. I checked the sitemap and there are no URL parameters listed - only the canonical URL listed on the sitemap.
If you have any other suggestions it'll be much appreciated.
Thank you!
-
Hi Rajesh,
Thank you for your response. I cannot share the website due to client's confidentiality but basically when I search to find a stockist {brand name}, Google lists similar URLs below on the first page. The pages are showing a list of stockists depending on the product availability:
1-website.com/find-stockist?model=10 (5xx status code)
2-website.com/find-stockist?model=11 (200 status code)
3-website.com/find-stockist?model=10 (5xx status code)
4-website.com/find-stockist?model=11 (200 status code)Thank you!
-
Hi Gaston,
Thanks very much for your time. The canonicals have implemented around a month ago and the pages are almost identical. I discovered all URL parameters without performing an advanced search.
Also, I come across the 5xx errors when I clicked indexed URL parameters on Google SERP and I cannot discover them when I crawl the site with Screaming Frog.
I'd appreciate if you have any other suggestions based on your experience!
Many thanks
-
Just so you know, if a URL results in a 5XX server error then it usually won't render your canonical tag to begin with! You might want to check your sitemap XML, to check that it's not 'undoing' your canonical tags by feeding these URLs to Google. Indexation tags must be perfectly aligned with your sitemap XML, or you are sending Google mixed messages (e.g: a URL is in sitemap XML so Google should index it, but when it is crawled it contains a canonical tag citing itself as non-canonical, which is the opposite signal)
Everything which Gaston said is right on the money
-
I think you need to show some examples.
-
Hi there,
Its important to note that canonicals are a signal. Google can obey them if its algorithm considers that those pages are actually canonicals between each other.
In my experience, this does not happen immediately, it usually takes Google some time to figure out if the canonicalization is correct. Keep in mind that pages being canonicalized HAVE TO be nearly identical and refer to the same topic.
And on the indexation part, pages can be indexed and be shown only when you search for that specific URL or using any advanced search parameter (such as site:).
More information about canonicals
- Consolidate duplicate URLs - Google Search supportRegarding the second issue, if you refer to "site crawling" as what you do with an external tool, such as Screaming Frog or Moz, you are getting 5xx errors because that tool is making to many requests, try lowering its crawl frequency. I know for a fact that Screaming Frog allows you to do that.
But, unfortunately, I don't know any other way of discovering URL parameters in bulk but using an external tool.Hope it helps,
Best luck.
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
-
Full title in url
Hi to all, what is the best url structure, to have all words in the url or to tweak url like Yoast suggest? If we remove some words from url , not focus keyword but stop words and other keywords to have shorter url will that impact search rankings? example.com/one-because-two-for-three-on-four - long url, moz crawl error, yoast red light example.com/one-two-three-four - moz ok, yoast ok Where one is a focus keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WalterHalicki0 -
Sanity Check: NoIndexing a Boatload of URLs
Hi, I'm working with a Shopify site that has about 10x more URLs in Google's index than it really ought to. This equals thousands of urls bloating the index. Shopify makes it super easy to make endless new collections of products, where none of the new collections has any new content... just a new mix of products. Over time, this makes for a ton of duplicate content. My response, aside from making other new/unique content, is to select some choice collections with KW/topic opportunities in organic and add unique content to those pages. At the same time, noindexing the other 90% of excess collections pages. The thing is there's evidently no method that I could find of just uploading a list of urls to Shopify to tag noindex. And, it's too time consuming to do this one url at a time, so I wrote a little script to add a noindex tag (not nofollow) to pages that share various identical title tags, since many of them do. This saves some time, but I have to be careful to not inadvertently noindex a page I want to keep. Here are my questions: Is this what you would do? To me it seems a little crazy that I have to do this by title tag, although faster than one at a time. Would you follow it up with a deindex request (one url at a time) with Google or just let Google figure it out over time? Are there any potential negative side effects from noindexing 90% of what Google is already aware of? Any additional ideas? Thanks! Best... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Partial Match or RegEx in Search Console's URL Parameters Tool?
So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them. Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789= All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe? Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ria_0 -
Where is the best location for my primary keyword in my URL?
http://moz.com/learn/seo/url says: http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html However I am wondering about structuring things this a little backwards from that: http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ (this would be an introduction and overview of the topic described by the primary keyword)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/ (this would be a category landing page with snippets from articles within the niche described by the secondary keyword, which is itself a niche of the primary keyword)
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/article-title/ (in-depth article on a topic within the scope of the secondary, which is within the scope of the primary) Where http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ is the most important page targeting the most important URL. Thoughts?0 -
Why is this SERP displaying an incorrect URL for my homepage?
The full URL of a particular site's homepage is something like http://www.example.com/directory/.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
The canonical and og URLs match.
The root domain 301 redirects to it using the absolute path. And yet the SERP (and the cached version of the page) lists it simply as http://www.example.com/. What gives? Could the problem be found at some deeper technical level (.htaccess or DirectoryIndex or something?) We fiddled with things a bit this week, and while our most recent changes appear to have been crawled (and cached), I am wondering whether I should give it some more time before I proceed as if the SERP won't ever reflect the correct URL. If so, how long? [EDIT: From the comments, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QKIweOzH4#t=2838]0 -
Static looking URL - Best practices?
We are about to modify the structure of our dynamic URLs and I wonder what the latest and greatest is in terms of SEO-friendly dynamic URLs. Our thinking so far is to do something like: www.domain.com/products/state/city/first-search-parameter+second-parameter+third-parameter+any-additional-keywords that is, using + to separate search parameters and hyphens to separate words An example might be www.homes.com/listings/ca/san-francisco/single-family-home+3-bedrooms+2-bathrooms+swimming-pool-garden-wood-exterior I'm not an SEO expert so any help would be appreciated Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lln220 -
Which URLs were indexed 2 years ago?
Hi, I hope anyone can help me with this issue. Our french domain experienced a huge drop of indexed URLs in 2012. More than 50k URLs were indexed, after the drop less than 10k were counted. I would like to check what happened here and which URLs were thrown out of the index. So I was thinking about a comparison between todays data and the data of 2012. Unfortunately we don't have any data on the indexed pages in 2012 beside the number of indexed pages. Is there any way to check, which URLs were indexed 2 years ago?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandra_h0 -
Sudden increase in number of indexed URLs. How ca I know what URLs these are?
We saw a spike in the total number of indexed URLs (17,000 to 165,000)--what would be the most efficient way to find out what the newly indexed URLs are?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0