Site-wide Canonical Rewrite Rule for Multiple Currency URL Parameters?

[NickG-123]

Hi Guys,

I am currently working with an eCommerce site which has site-wide duplicate content caused by currency URL parameter variations. Example:

https://www.marcb.com/

https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=3

https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=2

https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=1

My initial thought is to create a bunch of canonical tags which will pass on link equity to the core URL version. However I was wondering if there was a rule which could be implemented within the .htaccess file that will make the canonical site-wide without being so labour intensive.

I also noticed that these URLs are being indexed in Google, so would it be worth setting a site-wide noindex to these variations also?

Thanks

[ThompsonPaul]

This issue is resolved by adding a single self-referential rel-canonical tag to the header of each page of the site, Catherine. Once you've done that, the URLs that contain the parameters will automatically contain the canonical to the primary URL (because the pages' code are actually the same - it's just the URL itself that is changing. By which I mean - there aren't separate pages for each of the currencies. They're are all the same page code, with just the parameter added to the URL and prices dynamically changed.)

This does mean that the search engines would index the page with the default prices, which appears to be Euros.

For example, if your home page had a self-referential canonical tag, it's canonical tag would be

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="<a class="attribute-value">http://www.marcb.com</a>" />

While this may seem redundant, it also means that this URL https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=2 would also contain the above canonical tag, since the page is actually built from the same code. So it's canonical would point to the correct URL automatically, without having to do anything specific for all those variations. This is a core function of how CMSs (Content Management Systems) templates work. This time it works in your favour.

You definitely don't want to no-index those parameter-based variations even if you could. Once you get the canonicals properly implemented, you want the search crawlers to keep crawling those pages URLs so they can discover the corrected canonicals and understand that they are intentional dupes of the core page. They'll eventually drop the parameter-based URLs out of the index, which you can monitor in your Google Search Console, for example. There's a major benefit to the site if the search crawlers aren't wasting their time on duplicate/useless pages, as well as reducing potential issues with Panda/Quality algorithms, so well worth getting this corrected right away.

Hope all that makes sense?

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

Added to note - you can also use GDC to inform Google which URL parameters should be ignored when indexing - can be a quick shortcut initially, but you'll definitely want to get rel-canonical properly implemented for Google as well as all the other search engines.

[SixSpokeMedia64]

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