There’s a new addition to Google’s webmaster tools which will be of interest if your website is one of those which adds long strings of characters to the URL thanks to a content management system trying to track various aspects of the visitor’s experience on the site. This means you if your URLs aren’t just www.bluewidgetcompany.co.uk/large-widgets.html, but instead have massive strings of stuff after the .html (or .htm, or .asp) bit. The problem is that all this stuff is customised to each visit, even though the page is the same, and you can imagine how this confuses search engines, which see different URLs for the same page each time they come round.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the intricacies here, as it’s already been done in Understanding the Updated URL Parameter Handling in Google’s Webmaster Tools on Search Engine People. If this doesn’t affect you (because your website has been designed nicely and when you click around, the URLs stay nice and simple), then just be grateful.
Good point Chris, explains a lot!
Hi Chris, I happen to be a blogger, I had to Add parameter “m” for the mobile version of my blog, but i am curious why I can’t see google taking notice of it. There are thousands of duplicate title tags ( which are actually just the mobile and desktop versions) I am afraid google might penalize me. What would you suggest?
I’ve tried the canonical tags in fact the canonical tags are part of the blogger templates, so there is no question about it.