• BBgmoro

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

          Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Get found
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
          Moz API

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. URL query strings and canonical tag

        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.

        URL query strings and canonical tag

        Technical SEO
        2
        3
        7889
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • bizarro1000
          bizarro1000 last edited by

          Hi,

          I have recently been getting my comparison website redesigned and developed onto wordpress and the site is now 90% complete. Part of the redesign has meant that there are now dynamic urls in the format:

          http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-productss/?display=cost&value=10

          I have other pages similar to this but with different content for the different price ranges and these are linked to from the menus:

          http://www.mywebsite.com/20-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=20

          Now my questions are:

          1. I am using Joost's All-in-one SEO plugin and this adds a canonical tag to the page that is pointing to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/ which is the permalink. Is this OK as it is or should i change this to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=10

          2. Which URL will get indexed, what gets shown as the display URL in the SERPs and what page will users land on? I'm a bit confused so apologies if these seem like silly questions.

          Thanks

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • bizarro1000
            bizarro1000 @DigitalGuru last edited by

            Thanks for your response Tom.

            Essentially there is only one query string variation that is live and linked to for the 10 pounds url.

            /10-pounds-products/     =>     /10-pounds-productss/?display=cost&value=10

            The text content is identical on both URLs however the query results are obviously different.

            I don't think there is a way to remove the canonical tag aside from removing the plugin so I may have to go with changing it to the query string.

            Ideally I would like for users to see the non-query version in the SERPs and the click through to the the query version of the page. Not sure that's possible now though I will speak to the developer to see if this issue is avoidable.

            Thanks again

            Rosh

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • DigitalGuru
              DigitalGuru last edited by

              If each URL with a different query string displays different information then they are effectively different pages, regardless of whether they're based on the same page framework or not (in this case /10-pounds-products/) - you only need to use a blanket canonical tag like the one' Joost's plugin gives if you want all these pages to be considered the same thing.

              If you would like these pages to appear in the SERPs then you should absolutely NOT have a canonical tag telling Google all query string versions of /10-pounds-products/ are the same - not least because it's not true.

              In answer to your questions -

              1. If you can change it to make whatever query string version you're viewing the canonical URL then do so otherwise I would remove it completely.

              2.if you keep the canonical tag then only /10-pounds-products/ will be listed in the SERPs

              bizarro1000 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • andrew-mso

                Canonical or hreflang?

                I have four English sites for four different countries, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I want to share some content between the sites. On the pages that share the content, which is essentially exactly the same on all 4 sites, do I use the hreflang tags like: or do I add a canonical tag to the other three pointing to the "origin", which would be the UK site? I believe it is best practice to use one or the other, but I'm not sure which make sense in this situation.

                Technical SEO | | andrew-mso
                0
              • Easigrass

                Should I use a canonical URL for images uploaded to a blog post in Wordpress?

                Hi, I have a wordpress website that has articles/news posts witch contain imagery. I've noticed that in the Media Library, when you upload an image to a blog post it generates a new permalink ...article-name/article-image-01.jpg I have Yoast SEO plugin and have the option to set a canonical URL for this image. Should I point it back to the actual article? Thanks for any helpers with this.

                Technical SEO | | Easigrass
                0
              • landport

                Query string parameters always bad for SEO?

                I've recently put some query string parameters into links leading to a 'request a quote' form which auto-fill the 'product' field with the name of the product that is on the referring product page. E.g. Red Bicycle product page >>> Link to RFQ form contains '?productname=Red-Bicycle' >>>> form's product field's default value becomes 'Red-Bicycle' I know url parameters can lead to keyword cannibalisation and duplicate content, we use sub-domains for our language changer. BUT for something like this, am I potentially damaging our SEO? Appreciate I've not explained this very well. We're using Kentico by the way, so K# macros are a possibility (I use a simple one to fill the form's Default Field).

                Technical SEO | | landport
                0
              • Vacatia_SEO

                Url folder structure

                I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
                A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
                _    domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _   domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature    _
                _   domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes. 
                ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
                _      domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _      domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
                _      domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.

                Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
                0
              • RevanaDigitalSEO

                Canonical Tag when using Ajax and PhantomJS

                Hello, We have a site that is built using an AJAX application. We include the meta fragment tag  in order to get a rendered page from PhantomJS. The URL that is rendered to google from PhantomJS then is www.oursite.com/?escaped_fragment= In the SERP google of course doesnt include the hashtag in the URL. So my question, with this setup, do i still need a canonical tag and if i do, would the canonical tag be the escaped fragment URL or the regular URL? Much Appreciated!

                Technical SEO | | RevanaDigitalSEO
                0
              • Mobify

                Why is Google replacing our title tags with URLs in SERP?

                Hey guys, We've noticed that Google is replacing a lot of our title tags with URLs in SERP. As far as we know, this has been happening for the last month or so and we can't seem to figure out why. I've attached a screenshot for your reference. What we know: depending on the search query, the title tag may or may not be replaced. this doesn't seem to have any connection to the relevance of the title tag vs the url. results are persistent on desktop and mobile. the length of the title tag doesn't seem to correlate with the replacement. the replacement is happening at mass, to dozens of pages. Any ideas as to why this may be happening? Thanks in advance,
                Peter mobify-site-www.mobify.com---Google-Search.png

                Technical SEO | | Mobify
                0
              • kaje

                Old URL redirect to New URL

                Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe

                Technical SEO | | kaje
                0
              • Hakkasan

                Google Off/On Tags

                I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?

                Technical SEO | | Hakkasan
                1

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.