URL parameters
What are URL parameters?
URL parameters are key-value pairs added to the end of a URL after a question mark, separated by ampersands, as in /shoes?colour=blue&sort=price. They pass information to the server or to analytics, and are used for filtering, sorting, pagination, internal search, session IDs and campaign tracking.
Some parameters change what the page shows, such as a filter, a page number or a search query. Others do not, such as UTM parameters, click IDs and session IDs. To a search engine, every distinct URL is potentially a separate page, so /shoes, /shoes?sort=price and /shoes?utm_source=newsletter can all be crawled and indexed separately even if they look the same.
Google’s Search Console used to have a URL Parameters tool for telling Google how to treat parameters. Google retired it in 2022, saying its systems had become good at working this out. Controlling parameters is now up to your site: canonicals, robots.txt, consistent internal linking and not generating needless variations in the first place.
Why URL parameters matter for SEO
Parameters are a common source of duplicate content, wasted crawl budget and index bloat. They can split signals, such as links, between several URLs for the same page, and cause the wrong version to appear in search.
How to handle URL parameters for SEO
- Audit which parameters your site generates and sort them into ones that change content and ones that do not.
- Link internally to clean URLs only. Never add tracking parameters to internal links.
- Add a canonical tag on parameter URLs pointing to the clean version when the content is the same.
- Keep parameter order consistent and avoid empty values, so the same view has one URL.
- Disallow crawl-only parameters, such as sort orders and session IDs, in robots.txt if they produce many URLs. Do not combine this with a canonical on the same URLs, since Google cannot see a canonical it is not allowed to crawl.
- Use paths rather than parameters for pages you want to rank, such as /shoes/trail/ instead of /shoes?type=trail.
URL parameters example
<!-- On https://example.com/shoes/?utm_source=newsletter -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/shoes/">URL parameters FAQ
Are URL parameters bad for SEO?
Not in themselves. They become a problem when they create many crawlable URLs with the same content. Google indexes parameter URLs fine when they are controlled.
What happened to the URL Parameters tool in Search Console?
Google retired it in 2022. Use canonical tags, robots.txt and clean internal links instead.
Related SEO terms
Faceted navigation lets visitors filter a list by attributes such as size, colour or price, and can create huge numbers of crawlable URLs.
A canonical tag is a link element that tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page when duplicates exist.
Duplicate content is the same or very similar content available at more than one URL, on one site or across sites. Google picks one version to show.
Crawl budget is the set of URLs Google can and wants to crawl on a site. It only becomes a constraint on very large or fast-changing sites.
UTM parameters are tags added to a URL, such as utm_source and utm_medium, that tell analytics tools where a visit came from.
Index bloat is when a search engine indexes many more of a site’s pages than it should, most of them low-value, duplicate or unintended URLs.