Can overly dynamic URLs be overcome with canonical meta tags?

[afmaury]

I tried searching for questions regarding dynamic URLs and canonical tags, but I couldn't find anything s hopefully this hasn't been covered.

There are a large number of overly dynamic URLs reported in our site crawl (>7,000). I haven't looked at each of these, but most of these either have a canonical meta tag or have are indicated as FOLLOW, NO INDEX pages. Will these be enough to overcome any negative SEO impact that may come from overly dynamic URLs?

We are down to almost 0 critical errors and this is now the biggest problem reported by the site crawl after too many on page links.

[Gus_Martin]

Hi there,

My view on canonical tags is that they were precisely created to enable webmasters to continue using parameters in URLs and still consolidate SEO authority to the right page.

I think the combination of Canonical tag + robots noindex, follow should definitely help.

We implemented this on couple of client sites and we obtained a nice lift from the linkjuiced passed on by those pages.

The best answer would be to integrate any parameters within your user session rather than add them to URL or even use a hashtag after the proper url :

http://www.example.com/nice-seo-url/#parameter=24-12-2011&userid=santa

[afmaury]

Thanks. I hadn't thought about using a hashtag. If the canonical tag should solve the issue anyway, I think I'll leave it as it is. It does make it a little tough to judge how many errors still remain via the site crawl though.

[afmaury]

Can anyone give their thoughts on this? Will the FOLLOW, NOINDEX and Canonical tags be enough to overcome the negative SEO impact of having 7000 overly dynamic URLs on our site?

[afmaury]

Will this continue to show as a "warning" in the SEOmoz Site Crawl even if it has the NOINDEX and Canonical tags?

[afmaury]

It looks like the warnings continue to show in the crawl analysis. I'll just have to filter them out after exporting the CSV file. If anyone has another solution, let me know!