URL Parameters & Duplicate Contents

When you interact with a website on the Net a session is set and upon receiving the answer you will see that the returned URL has strings at the end of the absolute URL. These are dynamically generated and also inform you of action taken and these are the URL parameters. They whole set at the end of URL also denotes a session ID.

Actually the parameters are associated with various actions or tasks like tracking, reordering, categorizing, product, filtering etc. They can exhibit a page with content in multiple ways often filtered or sorted out. If you are searching for blue sweaters on an eCommerce site the action will sort out the blue sweaters from other colored ones and show you only the blue ones. In short the date source has been filtered here.   

The parameters are set in the back end process or the admin interface as per the design and desire of the exhibitor. Usually the programmer or developer will decide what dynamic tasks have to be performed for the visitors.  

URL variables start with a question mark. ?

Example

www.example.com/sweaters?size=medium&sort=latest

This is a dynamic URL and more variables can be added using the ampersand (&)

Though the URL variables have a functional approach they can lead to a duplication issue since the search engines take the dynamic urls or urls with variables as separate. Hence same page along with the one's with the parameters is construed as duplicate content and so is the keyword or anchor text associated with it.  

Other complications may arise like the splitting of page rank. The URLs with variables make them  difficult to read, less memorable and less clickable as a consequence.  

Solution?

First you should ask the developer to restrict the use of URL with variables to ones absolutely necessary. 

You can noindex,nofollow the dynamic URLs in the meta.   

You can use the canonical tag to identify the main URL

In the robot.txt disallow the pages with string query ? 

Disallow: /*?* 

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In search console you can use the parameter tool to instruct Google about the URLs with variables on your website and what to do with regarding the crawl and indexing.

Read Google Support on the Parameter Tool

If you find things difficult to comprehend you should use the option Let Google Decide. During the crawl Googlebot takes many aspects in consideration and decides one URL to value from other similar ones. 

Smaller sites should strict to static URL pattern creating sub folders if necessary. For larger eCommerce site using CMS dynamic URLs are required for offering multiple views of the pages. Managing various issues associated with the complex structures are given in the options above. 

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