Using a slash before a question mark in a URL - Does it make a difference to rankings?

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We are building a section on our website that will use "question marks" in the URL for different sorting filters on lists of products. I have seen a lot of websites use this sort of structure, they would for example use:
www.example.com/products?_color=blue

I have 2 questions:

1. My understanding is that this works fine for the purpose - Google understands that the actual page is just www.example.com/products and that what comes after "?" is just a filter. Google also understands that the link value of any links from other websites to www.example.com/products?_color=blue helps to rank the actual page, in this case www.example.com/products and not www.example.com/products?_color=blue. Is this correct?

2. The system we build creates an issue (which my developers are not able to fix), which is that a slash is added in the URL before the question mark, like this: www.example.com/products/?_color=blue Does this create any issues in terms of SEO, or does Google react to this the same way as it would without the slash? My concerns are that the slash might make the search engines believe that it is a different page, and thereby not see what comes after the question mark as just a filter for the page www.example.com/products/. This might mean that it would try to index www.example.com/products/?_color=blue (which I don't want) or not attribute the link power to the page www.example.com/products/ (and I really want the link power to that page instead of to a "filter page"). Does anyone know about this?

I have searched all over the web, but there is not a single article/post that answers this from and SEO perspective.
#search engine optimization #difference #make #mark #question #rankings #slash #url
  • The slash is not a problem.

    The problem is the ?= or whatever ya got....

    It makes (in practice) more urls that can lead to the same product.

    KISS...keep it simple..Sam.

    The more parameters you have in your filter, the more useless urls generated.

    That is the problem. Cut down on your filters to a small number.

    If you are filtering something like: blue things with a pocket shaped like a triangle....
    Forget it. That is going to get lost in the shuffle if it has 3 filters like, blue, pocket, triangle.

    As far as links go, google, mostly, ignores anything after a ?, hence creating a link to the main domain, in theory.

    Why? Because the possibilities are endless. In fact, you can type any url, put ?=gibbersih, and it will just go to the normal url. Another tip as to why you need better filters.

    Big ecommerce sites, like hotels, amazon, etc. do not rely on links to individual products.

    If you want a book by some author, chances are, a page was created with all books by that author. Hence, google finds each book on THAT page, rather than a million filters.

    You can use robots.txt to ignore search queries, session ids, etc.

    Google loves a url structure that us easy for a bot and human to read...

    The slash before is irrelevant to anything bad.

    Now this is right from google's mouth:

    "Allow search bots to crawl your site without session IDs or URL parameters that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page."

    Get new developers. If they can't fix what they broke, or are clueless, fire 'em.

    Too many people "hire" developers...then come here.

    I have never heard of a real business, with real developers, needing the warrior forum....

    I can't imagine anyone from amazon coming here, asking how to fix something.

    Paul
  • Fantastic answer, thank you Paul!
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