Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
-
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise?
Thank you.
-
Search engines and informed individuals are used to ?'s as like Takeshi said "query parameters" or "query variables". For everyone else it might look "questionable" (Sorry just had to say it
) -
That is a great answer. Parameters have caused some grief for me thank you!
-
The question mark and the values that follow are known as "query parameters" or "query variables", and they actually can impact your SEO. Google can look at the different variations of the URL, and index them as separate pages, leading to duplicate content.
The easiest fix for this is to put a canonical tag in your header, so that Google knows the what the proper URL for the page is supposed to be. You can also tell Google to ignore specific query parameters in Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > URL Parameters.
-
Nope
You may find this question from earlier today helpful -
http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/weird-back-link-showed-in-moz-crawl
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
-
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cin7_Marketing0 -
How do I know if I am correctly solving an uppercase url issue that may be affecting Googlebot?
We have a large e-commerce site (10k+ SKUs). https://www.flagandbanner.com. As I have begun analyzing how to improve it I have discovered that we have thousands of urls that have uppercase characters. For instance: https://www.flagandbanner.com/Products/patriotic-paper-lanterns-string-lights.asp. This is inconsistently applied throughout the site. I directed our website vendor to fix the issue and they placed 301 redirects via a rule to the web.config file. Any url that contains an uppercase character now displays as a lowercase. However, as I use screaming frog to monitor our site, I see all these 301 redirects--thousands of them. The XML sitemap still shows the the uppercase versions. We have had indexing issues as well. So I'm wondering what is the most effective way to make sure that I'm not placing an extra burden on Googlebot when they index our site? Should I have just not cared about the uppercase issue and let it alone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webrocket0 -
Disallow URLs ENDING with certain values in robots.txt?
Is there any way to disallow URLs ending in a certain value? For example, if I have the following product page URL: http://website.com/category/product1, and I want to disallow /category/product1/review, /category/product2/review, etc. without disallowing the product pages themselves, is there any shortcut to do this, or must I disallow each gallery page individually?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
SEO time
I wanto to be in the top of the google search. I am usiing a lot of SEO tools but... I have done it during one month. Do I have to wait more?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlosZambrana0 -
SEO impact difference between a URL Rewrite and 301 redirect
Hi guys and girls! Just putting a new site live, we changed the URL from one thing to another and I created a 301 file redirecting the urls like for like. The developer installing it has created a different file with columns like: RewriteRule ^page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^/page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] What's the difference? The page redirects but is there a difference between the 301 redirect and this URL rewrite in terms of SEO and link value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
How does having multiple pages on similar topics affect SEO?
Hey everyone, On our site we have multiple pages that have similar content. As an example, we have a section on Cars (in general) and then specific pages for Used Cars, European Cars, Remodeled Cars etc. Much of the content is similar on these page and the only difference is some content and the additional term in the URL (for example car.com/remodeled-cars and /european-cars). In the past few months, we've noticed a dip in our organic ranking and started doing research. Also, we noticed that Google, in SERPs, shows the general page (cars.com/cars) and not the specific page (/european-cars), even if the specific page has more content. Can having multiple pages with similar content hurt SEO? If so, what is the best way to remedy this? We can consolidate some of the pages and make the difference between them a little clearer, but does it make that much of a difference for rankings? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonathonOhayon0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Brackets in a URL String
Was talking with a friend about this the other day. Do Brackets and or Braces in a URL string impact SEO? (I know short human readable etc... but for the sake of conversation has anyone relaised any impacts of these particular Characters in a URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0