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Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
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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.
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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
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That is a great answer. Parameters have caused some grief for me thank you!
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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.
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Nope
You may find this question from earlier today helpful -
http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/weird-back-link-showed-in-moz-crawl
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