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What to do with duplicated pages with params in the url?

by ryonn
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi Warriors,

Firstly, Merry Christmas 2016!! =)

I have a situation with my website.
It is about an SEO mistake that I made during the development of the site, which is related to the GET parameter.

I have the following url format:

domain.com/items?orderby=name&order=asc

However, I did not set the canonical nor noindex to the URL format above, hence now the pages displayed in Google is the combination of the url above, something like:


domain.com/items?orderby=name&order=asc
domain.com/items?orderby=name&order=desc
domain.com/items?orderby=date&order=asc
domain.com/items?orderby=date&order=desc

I do not need the pages above to display in Google, since it hurts the other important pages.
My question is,
how should I deal with this?

Should I set 'noindex' to all of the pages above?
or
Should I set 'canonical' linkrel to /items?

I am not sure what the good / bad side of each are?

Can you please help me with this?

Please advise.

Thank you

Kind regards,
Ron
#duplicated #pages #params #url
  • Profile picture of the author MrPants
    Hi Ron,

    Merry Christmas to you too!

    Duplication in SEO is always tricky and in my opinion an overrated technical issue (Google is good at figuring things out!) I would just leave things as they are and let Google decide which URL it wants to rank in its index, it will most likely be /items especially as this is the page you will be promoting.

    Cheers!
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  • Profile picture of the author Sclark
    In case the URL parameters do not affect the content (the page domain.com/items?orderby=name&order=asc looks same as domain.com/items) - you should simply canonicalize the long URLs by setting the initial static item page as canonical for them, then the clean URL should take place in search results instead of the ?orderby=name&order=asc URLs.

    In case the parameters have any impact on the main content of the page - you may lose the rankings by settings the canonicals, as the pages would be treated as different. However, in this case you can simply leave the URLs as is (or just think of a way to make them a bit more friendly/descriptive), but such URLs shouldn`t be a real issue with Google.

    Happy Holidays you too!
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