How to prevent channel identifiers from showing up in the SERPs?
-
We append our urls with channel identifiers (?cid) to help us analyze where traffic is coming from. Recently, our appended urls with channel identifiers are showing up in the SERPs. How can we stop this from happening and prevent in the future? Has anyone had similar issues?
-
Ugh, yeah, I definitely don't like seeing those parameters indexed. Reaching out to the Moz team to see if anyone has used Adobe Experience Manager. If it weren't a CMS or analytics setup issue, I do think rel=canonical would be a good fit here, but it's possible there are better setup options for the product that I'm not aware of. Once they're indexed, though, it's typically going to mean rel=canonical or a redirect to get rid of them. You could use Google Search Console, but they've pulled back a lot of the parameter handling options (at least temporarily) in the new version.
-
We use Adobe Experience Manager
-
For example, if you google Morningstar Direct, the first organic search results include ?cid=RED_DIR0001. As you scroll through the search results, there are other instances of this happening.
-
Yeah, you may have options in your CMS. Challenge at this point is that those URLs are already indexed, so if you change your CMS settings to use a different kind of identifier (again, we're being very fuzzy on details) you may still need a solution to de-index those URLs.
-
What platform do you use for your website / shop? there can be other and more easy ways to correct this than the re-cononical.
But like Dr. Peter J. Meyers asks, need abit more information / link or something to help you with the best solution for youre current platform
-
There are a couple of ways to go about it, but this is a situation where the rel-canonical tag is probably your best bet. It'll attribute all of those URLs back to the parent URL, set up correctly. If you can provide some specifics (or even a semi-fictional example), I can try to give you more guidance.
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
-
Two of Four Google Analytics Views Not Showing Data
Question for you MOZ friends: We added two new views about a week ago, the same views that we have added for more than 50 Accounts, and they are not showing any data. The views are for 'Filtered Traffic' (no IPs or spam) and 'Organic Only' including only the organic medium. Any ideas why this may not be working? First time we've come across this and couldn't find much help researching it... Thanks as always! street%20ga_zpsorfdnemi.png
Reporting & Analytics | | ReunionMarketing0 -
Google Analytics Goal/Event/SOMETHING to show only Wordpress "Posts", not pages, etc
Hi all, Our site is build on Wordpress and formerly the post URL's had the typical date format at the beginning. This made it easy for me to look at, for example, all search traffic to the blog. I would just view URL's containing /2014/ and /2015/ and boom. We have since removed the dates from the URL's with proper redirects etc, which is great, but now I can't figure out a way to look at ONLY the blog in GA. I like to track a KPI of 'search visits to blog posts' and I can't figure out how to now. Can I set up a GA event that only fires when the post type template for blog posts loads? Some other solution? I'm lost here, and there's gotta be a good way to do it...
Reporting & Analytics | | 3DR0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Why seomoz shows me "missing meta discription" on this plugin: http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/plugins/dopbsp/frontend-ajax.php ? Should I edit? how?? IIs it posible??
Good day to all! I am very confuse about results on seomoz Crawl Diagnostics Summary, especially with 6 Crawl Warnings Found. It says title too short: http://villasdiani.com/category/mombasa/, http://villasdiani.com/category/watamu/ , http://villasdiani.com/sitemap/ why would Google punish me for this??? why should I make longer title for sitemap? or Watamu? It is the name of the place - Watamu or Mombasa. It is very confusing for me. I have very big mess with the website and it is not ranking:-( what I have done:-( and is it possible to meta description for this plugin: http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/plugins/dopbsp/frontend-ajax.php how?? I even do not know where is it.
Reporting & Analytics | | VillasDiani0 -
Analytics Showed Steady Growth Until Now?
Last 10 weeks have seen steady growth in visitors and pages viewed, yet this week it has dropped a bit from last week (virtually stagnant). Is our user base simply hitting a plateau, or is there another reason?
Reporting & Analytics | | wlefevre0 -
Google Analytics: Do url redirects show up
Good Morning from 6 degrees c mostly cloudy wetherby UK 🙂 A redirect has been set up with the effect that when you key in www.hyload.co.uk it forwards to www.ikogroup.co.uk My question is please...within Google analytics will referall traffic from www.hyload.co.uk show up in referral traffic or because its a redirect will it be counted as direct traffic. Thanks in advance, David
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing0 -
Moved Up in SERPS & Traffic, Need Help Converting
Hello, After listening to the advice of many of you on this forum, I have managed to move my site up in the SERPS, close enough to where I want/need to be. My traffic has increased heavily, yet I am still not seeing a large increase in orders being placed. I am positive that I have the lowest prices on these items, and the most information available about them, yet I still can't seem to convert a lot of this traffic into sales. Can you guys please take a look at my site and provide some guidance on what I can/should do to help convert these visitors to customers? my site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Prime850 -
Google vs Bing/Yahoo SERP results?
I see large differences in Google and Bing/Yahoo SERP results for many keywords. Google shows many of our primary keywords in their top ten, while Bing/Yahoo rank the same one 40-50 or above. Do you have any insight on their differences that might account for this variation? We are legitimate, long time, white hatters at a small manufacturer that is one of the leaders in our industry. The only thing I can think of that might describe this issue is PPC advertising. Their algorithms wouldn't be that inconsistent would they? (We do much more paid advertising on Google) But generally this should have no affect, right? Thanks, George...
Reporting & Analytics | | rhawk0