How to manage URLs with parameters to optimize natural search engine optimization (SEO)

URL parameters are the parts of a web page address (example: https://www.adresse.com/urlpage) often visible after a question mark (?): for example https://www.adresse.com/urlpage?parametre=test, an ampersand (&), equals (=) or another attribute. If not handled correctly, they can cause serious indexing problems for your Web site, and lead to a drop in your traffic from search engines.

URL parameters are mainly used for: filters within product category pages, search queries, etc.

So how do you avoid these problems?

Why is URL structure important?

URLs help search engines understand the content and structure of a site. A concise, descriptive page URL is also more likely to be clicked on in search engine results, as a long URL full of incomprehensible parameters is harder for the human brain to process and interpret.

1- Common problems with URL parameters

Incorrectly configured URL parameters can cause :

• duplicate content: pages with very similar URLs are all alike in Google's eyes.
• wasted crawl budget: Google defines a maximum amount of time to spend on a website. The time it spends on useless pages corresponds to time it won't spend indexing new pages or refreshing the content of relevant pages updated in parallel. It may also consider the site poorly structured if it engulfs itself in an infinite number of pages with parameters.

Let's take a look at the most common problems with URL parameters.

Duplicate content

Generating URL parameters based on website filters can create serious problems, especially for e-commerce sites: if your website allows users to sort content by price or by characteristic (color, size, etc.), and these options don't actually modify the page content but merely rearrange the results, this can harm your website's performance.

The URLs in the following example should, in theory, all point to the same content: a collection of bicycles, for example. The only difference is that some of these pages may be organized or filtered slightly differently. The parameter part of the URL starts with a question mark.

http://www.example.com/products/bikes.aspx
http://www.example.com/products/bikes.aspx?category=mountain&color=blue
http://www.example.com/products/bikes.aspx?category=mountain&type=womens&color=blue

The examples shown above are typical of faceted navigation on an e-commerce site. Faceted navigation systems have numerous filtering options that allow you to reorganize the results of a category using predefined filtering options. Ultimately, this helps you find what you want, but it can lead to problems when parameters are used.

Wasting the crawl budget

Search engines may not be able to crawl your website efficiently if many parameter-based URLs are available for indexing.
It's possible, for example, that for the same product category page, more than 50 versions of this page exist due to the parameters.

Static URL: www.example.com/dining-furniture

Search URL: www.example.com/?q=dining-furniture

Brand filter URL: www.example.com/dining-furniture?brand=stressless

Color filter URL: www.example.com/dining-furniture?colour=brown

Filter by product type: www.example.com/dining-furniture?type=recliner=stressless

Filter by product type and brand: www.example.com/dining-furniture?type=recliner=stressless

2- Examples of parameter problems: When everything goes wrong

Take, for example, a site that uses URL parameters to dynamically offer products and search filter results for bike types, brands, sizes, styles or child or adult audiences. The additional problem is that this site doesn't handle the many dynamically generated URL parameter pages that ultimately create competing category pages for Google to index.

To illustrate how parameterized URLs hurt organic performance, the screenshot below shows Google's search results for "women's bikes" at the time. For this search, the main bike category appeared in the search results rather than its women's bike category page:

The Decathlon and Evans Cycles women's bike category pages were indexed first, which makes sense since these pages best match the "women's bikes" search query. Unfortunately for our example site, they failed to solve the problem of numerous duplicate parameter pages, preventing Google from ranking their women's bikes page.

To understand the extent of the problems, I ran a site: type search on the domain (site:halfords.com women's bikes) to identify competing pages for the term women's bikes. The results of this search revealed why the wrong page was being ranked.

The product category filtering options and additional search filtering options created other pages that were competing for the same term. Halfords saw its organic traffic drop because it didn't know the technical SEO issues to avoid these parameter problems in order to help Google understand which pages were relevant to index.

Ideally, your pages should use a search-engine-friendly URL structure, but you can always use parameters as long as you take the necessary steps to avoid duplication and indexing problems.

The fact that Halfords had several pages for women's bikes with variations of women's bikes in their page titles and headers, held back their performance. This is a classic example of a website confusing search engines by having two or more pages covering the same topic, meaning that search engines don't know which page to rank.

Does Halfords still have a settings problem?

If we look at the site now using the same site command for site:halfords.com "womens bikes", we can see that Halfords ranks well for this term.

However, if we scroll down the search engine results we can see that the parameter problem that they had before has not completely gone away as the parameter page is still in Google's index.

Why is this? If we look at the source code of the Women's Bikes settings page, it includes a self-referencing canonical tag instead of telling Google that the main Women's Bikes page is the page to index.