Do parameters in a URL make a difference from an SEO point of view

[cbarron]

We us a number of different parameters in a number of our URLs to track how the user has navigated to the page. So for example we will have a page www.example.com/product/?banner to show that the user has navigated to the page from the banner as opposed to www.example.com/product/?footer to show that the user has navigated to the page from the footer. Do search engines treat these pages as the same page or different pages? Thanks

[jfmonfette]

Yes they are treated as two different pages. To inform the search engines that they are the same page, you need to use the canonical URL tag. Here's Moz.com's info about it : http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

You can also declare it to Google in Webmaster tools: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en

Bing also offers this functionnality: http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/04/27/better-than-canonical-url-normalization.aspx

I hope this helps !

[cbarron]

Thanks very much Jean-Francois

[ChadC]

Remember that a parameter should have two parts: a parameter and a value.

ex. www.example.com/product/?nav=banner

in this example nav would be the parameter and banner would be the value. This is important when using the Google webmasters parameter handling tool. With your current method you are only using a value and so you will need to declare every single value as a parameter. But if you use a parameter correctly, then you would just need to declare the parameter (in this example nav) and the search engines would then automatically ignore the value. The cost of not using a parameter correctly can compound really quick in an organization that is trying to track a lot of different things.

Also note that most analytics packages already utilize pre-determined parameters for tracking. If you are using Google analytic then I would suggest justinvestigating using  there URL builder (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en) for off site tracking. Then to track internal traffic Google Analytic wants you to use Goals and Events. With Omniture you actually can set what your parameters will be during set up. I would suggest setting one up for internal campaign tracking and one for external campaign tracking.  Anyways, all this just to say you might what to double check your options on tracking.  Hope this helps!

[cbarron]

Hi Chad

Thanks for the info. I should have been more specific with my example. The parameter that we use is something along the lines of www.example.com/product/?banner=1 so if I have picked up what you have said correctly I should be able to flag "banner" through webmaster tools and the search engines will ignore the value. Is that correct?

[ChadC]

Yes,if you flag it in webmaster tools Google will consider ignoring it, but I would also flag it in Bing as well.

You might also want to consider if you could make it easier on yourself by doing something like nav=banner1, nave=banner2, and nav=footer1 and then you only have to put in nav into the parameter handling tool. As appose to using banner=1, banner=2 and footer=1 and then having to put both banner and footer into the your parameter handling tools. There are reasons to use the different parameters, but as a general rule I try to keep the number of parameters as small as possible. I find it easier to scale my site and tracking that way. Good Luck!

[cbarron]

Thanks