HTML is a markup language that forms the basis of most webpages.

It is arguably one of the most fundamental parts of technical SEO.

Using HTML elements, SEO professionals are able to communicate information about the page to users and search bots.

This can help to clarify the importance, nature, and order of content on a page, as well as its relationship to other webpages.

What Are HTML Attributes?

Attributes are additional information added to HTML elements. They sit within the element, such as:

They are values that are used to modify the element, giving additional context about it.

In the case of the HTML tag above, the attribute, rel=”canonical” modifies the link tag to say to the search bots that this URL should be considered the canonical of a set.

Format Of HTML Attributes

HTML attributes consist of a name and a value.

For example, when defining an image, the name “src” is used and the value is the file name of the image. The “alt” attribute specifies an alternative text to show if the image cannot be displayed.

Types Of HTML Attributes

Attributes are usually classified in four ways; required, optional, standard or event.

Required attributes are ones where their absence from a tag means that tag would not function correctly.

Optional ones are, as the name suggests, not required for the tag to work but can be used to specify additional information or behaviour for that tag.

There are attributes that can be used with most HTML elements, and some that are very specific.

For example, the “style” attribute can be used to define the look of an element like the colour or font size. These universal attributes are known as “standard” or “global” attributes.

There are other attributes that can only be used with certain elements. Commonly, ones that are used for SEO will modify a link tag. These are elements like “rel” and “hreflang.”

Event attributes are added to an element to define how that element should behave in response to certain actions like a user mousing over a button. These attributes define how a function should be executed.

For example, an “onclick” attribute would define what a JavaScript function should do when a user clicks a button. These attributes allow developers to create more interactive pages from HTML tags.

Why HTML Attributes Are Important

HTML attributes are important because they allow developers to add additional context and functionality to websites.

They are particularly important for SEO because they give much-needed context to tags. They are critical in how we guide the search bots in crawling and serving webpages.

Attributes allow us to easily prevent the following of certain links, or denote which pages in a set should be served to users in different countries or using other languages.

They allow us to easily signify that a page should not be indexed. A lot of the fundamental elements of technical SEO are actually controlled through HTML attributes.

Common Attributes Used In SEO

1. Name Attribute

The name attribute is used with the tag.

It is essentially a way of specifying to any bots that may visit the page if the following information applies to them or not.

For example, including means that all bots should take notice of the “noindex” directive.

You will often hear this called the “meta robots tag.”

If the following were used , only Google’s bot would need to take notice of the “noindex” directive.

This is a good way of giving commands to some search bots that are not needed for all.

2. Noindex Attribute

The “noindex” attribute is one commonly used in SEO.

You will often hear it being called the “noindex tag,” but more accurately, it is an attribute of the tag.

It’s formulated:

This piece of code allows publishers to determine what content can be included in a search engine’s index.

By adding the “noindex” attribute, you are essentially telling a search engine it may not use this page within its index.

This is useful if there is sensitive content you want to not be available from an organic search. For instance, if you have areas on your site that should only be accessible to paid members, allowing this content into the search indices could make it accessible without logging in.

The “noindex” directive needs to be read to be followed. That is, the search bots need to be able to access the page to read the HTML code that contains the directive.

As such, be careful not to block the robots from accessing the page in the robots.txt.

3. Description Attribute

The description attribute, better known as the “meta description,” is used with the tag.

The content of this tag is used in the SERPs underneath the content of the

of the page.

The tag is used to link a resource to another and appears in the

of the page.

These links are not hyperlinks, they are not clickable. They show the relationship between web documents.

5. Rel=”nofollow”, rel=”ugc” And rel=”sponsored attributes”

The rel=”nofollow” attribute tells bots that the URL within the href attribute is not one that can be followed by them.

Using the rel=”nofollow” attribute will not affect a human user’s ability to click on the link and be taken to another page. It only affects bots.

This is used within SEO to prevent search engines from visiting a page or from ascribing any benefit of one page linking to another.

This arguably renders a link useless from the traditional SEO link-building perspective, as link equity will not pass through the link.

There are arguments to say that it is still a beneficial link if it causes visitors to view the linked-to page, of course!

Publishers can use the “nofollow” attribute to help search engines determine when a linked-to page is the result of payment, such as an advert.

This can help prevent issues with link penalties, as the publisher is admitting that the link is the result of a legitimate deal and not an attempt to manipulate the rankings.

The rel=”nofollow” attribute can be used on an individual link basis like the following:

anchor text of link goes here

Or it can be used to render all links on a page as “nofollow” by using it in the

like a “noindex” attribute is used:

You can read more here about when to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

6. How Google Uses The Rel=”nofollow” Attribute

In 2019, Google announced some changes to the way it used the “nofollow” attribute.

This included introducing some additional attributes that could be used instead of the “nofollow” to better express the relationship of the link to its target page.

These newer attributes are the rel=”ugc” and rel=”sponsored.”

They are to be used to help Google understand when a publisher wishes for the target page to be discounted for ranking signal purposes.

The rel=”sponsored” attribute is to identify when a link is the result of a paid deal such as an advert or sponsorship. The rel=”ugc” attribute is to identify when a link has been added through user-generated content (UGC) such as a forum.

Google announced that these and the “nofollow” attribute would only be treated as hints.

Whereas previously, the “nofollow” attribute would result in Googlebot ignoring the specified link, it now takes that hint under advisement but may still treat it as if the “nofollow” is not present.

Read more here about this announcement and how it changes the implementation of the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

7. Hreflang Attribute

The purpose of the hreflang attribute is to help publishers whose sites show the same content in multiple languages.

It directs the search engines as to which version of the page should be shown to users so they can read it in their preferred language.

The hreflang attribute is used with the tag. This attribute specifies the language of the content on the URL linked to.

It’s used within the

of the page and is formatted as follows:

It’s broken down into several parts:

• The rel=”alternate,” which suggests the page has an alternative page relevant to it.
• The href= attribute denotes which URL is being linked to.
• The language code is a two-letter designation to tell the search bots what language the linked page is written in. The two letters are taken from a standardized list known as the ISO 639-1 codes

The hreflang attribute can also be used in the HTTP header for documents that aren’t in HTML (like a PDF) or in the website’s XML sitemap.

Read more here about using the hreflang attribute correctly.

8. Canonical Attribute

The rel=”canonical” attribute of the link tag enables SEO professionals to specify which other page on a website or another domain should be counted as the canonical.

A page being the canonical essentially means it is the main page, of which others may be copies.

For search engine purposes, this is an indication of the page a publisher wants to be considered the main one to be ranked, the copies should not be ranked.

The canonical attribute looks like this:

The code should sit in the

of the page. The web page stated after the “href=” should be the page you want the search bots to consider the canonical page.

This tag is useful in situations where two or more pages may have identical or near-identical content on them.

9. Uses Of The Canonical Attribute

The website might be set up in such a way that this is useful for users, such as a product listing page on an ecommerce site.

For instance, the main category page for a set of products, such as “shoes”, may have copy, headers, and a page title that have been written about “shoes.”

If a user were to click on a filter to show only brown, size 8 shoes, the URL might change but the copy, headers, and page title might remain the same as the “shoes” page.

This would result in two pages that are identical apart from the list of products that are shown.

In this instance, the website owner might wish to put a canonical tag on the “brown, size 8 shoes” page pointing to the “shoes” page.

This would help the search engines to understand that the “brown, size 8 shoes” page does not need to be ranked, whereas the “shoes” page is the more important of the two and should be ranked.

Issues With The Canonical Attribute

It’s important to realize that the search engines only use the canonical attribute as a guide, it is not something that has to be followed.

There are many instances where the canonical attribute is ignored and another page selected as the canonical of the set.

Read more about how to use the canonical attribute correctly.

10. Src Attribute

The src= attribute is used to reference the location of the image that is being displayed on the page.

If the image is located on the same domain as the container it will appear in, a relative URL (just the end part of the URL, not the domain) can be used.

If the image is to be pulled from another website, the absolute (whole) URL needs to be used.

Although this attribute doesn’t serve any SEO purpose as such, it is needed for the image tag to work.

11. Alt Attribute

The above image tag example also contains a second attribute, the alt= attribute.

This attribute is used to specify what alternate text should be shown if the image can’t be rendered.

The alt= attribute is a required element of the tag, it has to be present, but can be left blank if no alternative text is wanted.

There is some benefit to considering the use of keywords within an image alt= attribute. Search engines cannot determine with precision what an image is of.

Great strides have been made in the major search engines’ ability to identify what is in a picture. However, that technology is far from perfect.

As such, search engines will use the text in the alt= attribute to better understand what the image is of.

Use language that helps to reinforce the image’s relevance to the topic the page is about.

This can aid the search engines in identifying the relevance of that page for search queries.

It is crucial to remember that this is not the primary reason for the alt= attribute.

This text is used by screen readers and assistive technology to enable those who use this technology to understand the contents of the image.

The alt= attribute should be considered first and foremost to make websites accessible to those using this technology. This should not be sacrificed for SEO purposes.

Read more about how to optimize images.

The More You Know About How Webpages Are Constructed, The Better

This guide is an introduction to the core HTML tag attributes you may hear about in SEO.

There are many more that go into making a functioning, crawlable, and indexable webpage, however.

The crossover between SEO and development skill sets is vast.

As an SEO professional, the more you know about how webpages are constructed, the better.

If you want to learn more about HTML and the tag attributes that are available with it, you might enjoy a resource like W3Schools.

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Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

SEO success depends on providing high-quality content to your audiences. The big question is: What exactly does “high quality” mean?

Content has many meanings. In digital marketing, it simply means the information a website displays to users.

But don’t forget: In a different context with a different emphasis on the word (content as opposed to content), content is a synonym for happy and satisfied. The meaning is different, but the letters are the same.

If you want to understand content quality online, keep these two different definitions in mind.

Every webpage has content. “High-quality” content depends on contexts like:

• What the needs of your audience are.
• What users expect to find.
• How the content is presented and how easy it is to pull critical information out of it quickly.
• How appropriate the medium of the content is for users’ needs.

What Makes Content High Quality?

This is a complex question that we hope to answer in full during this article. But let’s start with a simple statement:

High-quality content is whatever the user needs at the time they’re looking for it.

This might not be helpful in a specific sense but note this somewhere because it’s a guiding light that has far-reaching implications for your website and audience strategy.

We use this definition because the quality of your content isn’t static. Google and other search engines know this and frequently update search engine results pages (SERPs) and algorithms to adjust for changing user priorities.

You need to bake this idea into your understanding of content and audiences. You can have the most beautifully written, best-formatted content, but if your target audience doesn’t need that information in that format, it’s not “high-quality” for SEO.

If you provide a story when the user is looking for a two-sentence answer, then you’re not serving their interests.

This is especially pertinent with the introduction of generative AI features into search platforms. This is a continuation of a “zero click” phenomenon for certain types of searches and why Google doesn’t send a user to a website for these searches.

Defining & Meeting Audience Needs

SEO professionals have many different ways of conceptualizing these ideas. One of the most common is “the funnel,” which categorizes content into broad categories based on its position in a marketing journey.

The funnel is usually categorized something like this:

• Top of the funnel: Informational intent and awareness-building content.
• Middle of the funnel: Consideration intent and product/service-focused content.
• Bottom of the funnel: Purchase intent and conversion content.

While it’s helpful to categorize types of content by their purpose in your marketing strategy, this can be an overly limiting view of user intent and encourages linear thinking when you conceptualize user journeys.

As Google gets more specific about intent, such broad categorization becomes less helpful in determining whether content meets users’ needs.

Build a list of verbs that describe the specific needs of your audience while they’re searching. Ideally, you should base this on audience research and data you have about them and their online activity.

Learn who they follow, what questions they ask, when a solution seems to satisfy them, what content they engage with, etc.

Then, create verb categories to apply to search terms during your keyword research. For example:

• Purchase.
• Compare.
• Discover.
• Learn.
• Achieve.
• Check.

User Intends To Purchase

If the user is looking for something to buy, then high quality probably looks like a clean landing or product page that’s easy to navigate. Be sure to include plenty of detail so search engines can match your page to specific parameters the user might enter or have in their search history.

Product photos and videos, reviews and testimonials, and Schema markup can all help these pages serve a better experience and convert. Pay particular attention to technical performance and speed.

Remember that you’re highly likely to go up against ads on the SERPs for these queries, and driving traffic to landing pages can be difficult.

User Intends To Compare

This could take a couple of different forms. Users might come to you for reviews and comparisons on other things or to compare your benefits to those of another company.

For this content to be successful, you need to be dialed into what problems a user is trying to solve, what pain points they have, and how specific differences impact their outcomes.

This is the old “features vs. benefits” marketing argument, but the answer is “both.” Users could want to see all the features listed, but don’t forget to contextualize how those features solve specific problems.

User Intends To Discover

This intent could describe a user looking for industry news, data to support their research, or new influencers to follow.

Prioritize the experience they’re seeking and ensure that the discovery happens quickly.

This could look like adding text summaries or videos to the top of posts, tables of contents to assist with navigation, or page design elements that highlight the most critical information.

User Intends To Learn

If a user intends to learn about a topic, a long, well-organized post, video, or series of either may serve them best. This content should be in-depth, well-organized, and written by genuine topic experts. You may need to demonstrate the author’s qualifications to build trust with readers.

You must consider the existing knowledge level of your target audience. Advanced content will not satisfy the needs of inexperienced users, while basic content will bore advanced users.

Don’t try to satisfy both audiences in a single experience. It’s tempting to include basic questions in this type of content to target more SEO keywords, but think about whether you’re trading keywords for user experience.

For example, if you write a post about “how to use a straight razor” and your subheadings look like the ones below, you’re probably not serving the correct intent.

• What is a straight razor?
• Are straight razors dangerous?
• Should I use a straight razor?

The chances are high that someone landing on your page “how to use a straight razor” doesn’t need answers to these basic questions. In other words, you’re wasting their time.

User Intends To Achieve

A slightly different intent from learning. In this instance, a user has a specific goal for an action they want to perform. Like learning content, it should be written by subject matter experts.

If the person creating this content doesn’t have sufficient first-hand experience, they won’t effectively guide users and predict their real-world needs. This results in unsatisfying content and a failure point of many SEO content strategies.

In SEJ’s SEO Trends 2024 ebook, Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Brand at Wix, said:

“One trend I would get ahead of that aligns with Google’s focus on expertise and experience is what I’m coining “situational content.” Situational content attempts to predict the various outcomes of any advice or the like offered within the content to present the next logical steps. If, for example, a piece of content provides advice about how to get a baby to sleep through the night, it would then offer the next steps if that advice didn’t work.

This is “situational” – if X doesn’t work, you might want to try Y. Situational content creates a compelling form of content I see more frequently. It does a few things for the reader:

• It addresses them and their needs directly.
• It’s more conversational than standard content (an emerging content
  trend itself).
• To predict various outcomes and situations, you have to actually know what
  you’re talking about.

That latter point directly addresses E-E-A-T. You can only predict and address secondary situations with expertise and experience. Most of all, situational content indicates to the user that a real person, not a large language model (LLM), wrote it.”

The difference between “learn” and “achieve” intents can be difficult to see. Sometimes, you might need to satisfy both. Pay careful attention to these types of content.

User Intends To Check

Misunderstanding when a user just wants to “check” something can cause you to waste resources on content doomed not to perform, and another failure point of SEO strategies. If what a user needs can be solved in a few sentences, you’re in zero-click territory.

For example, ‘How to tie a bowtie’.

That is, Google will serve users an answer on the SERP, and they may not click a link at all. You may want to target these types of queries as part of longform content for other search intents using good content organization and Schema markup.

That way, you can give your authoritative and in-depth content opportunities to show up in rich results on SERPs, and users might click through if they see more information available or have follow-up questions.

You should consider these intents part of your SEO strategy, but think of them as awareness and branding tactics. AI features such as AI Overviews in Google seek to surface quick answers to queries. It will be much harder to acquire clicks on SERPs where features like this are activated.

If you struggle to understand why well-written content is losing traffic, you should assess whether you wrote hundreds of words to answer a query that only needed 30.

More intents exist, and to complicate matters further, they are not exclusive to each other in a single piece of content. Comparison and discovery intents, for example, often combine in listicles, product comparisons, and titles like “X alternatives to X.”

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Content Quality Signifiers

While there’s no quantifiable answer to what good content means, there are many ways to evaluate it to ensure it contains key signs of quality.

Google’s content guidelines provide some questions you can ask yourself to objectively assess your content’s quality.

The SEO content mantra is E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Google uses many signals to approximate these concepts and apply these signals to ranking algorithms. To be clear, E-E-A-T are not ranking factors themselves. But they are the concepts that ranking systems attempt to emulate via other signals.

These concepts apply to individual pages and to websites as a whole.

Experience: Are the people creating content directly knowledgeable about the subject matter, and do you demonstrate credible experience?

Expertise: Does your content demonstrate genuine expertise through depth, accuracy, and relevance?

Authoritativeness: Is your website an authoritative source about the topic?

Trust: Is your website trustworthy, considering the information or purposes at hand?

In its content guidelines, Google says this about E-E-A-T:

“Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn’t necessarily have to demonstrate all of them. For example, some content might be helpful based on the experience it demonstrates, while other content might be helpful because of the expertise it shares.”

Understanding these concepts is critical for building a content strategy because publishing content with poor E-E-A-T signals could impact your website as a whole. Google’s language downplays this potential impact, but it’s critical to know that it’s possible. It’s tempting to assume that because a website has high “authority” in a general sense or in one particular area, anything it publishes is considered authoritative. This may not be true.

If you chase traffic by creating content outside your core areas of authority and expertise, that content may perform poorly and drag the rest of your site down.

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Creating Effective SEO Content

This article focuses on written content, but don’t neglect multimedia in your content strategy.

The thought process behind content should go a little bit like this:

Audience > Query (Keywords) > Intent > Brief / Outline > Create

You can also express it as a series of questions:

• Audience: Who is our audience?
• Query: What are they searching for?
• Intent: Why?
• Brief: How can we best assist them?
• Create: What does exceptional user experience look like?

Keyword Research For Content

Keyword research is a massive topic on its own, so here are some key pieces of advice and a few additional resources:

• Look at the SERPs for the keywords you target to understand what Google prioritizes, what your competitors are doing, what success looks like, and whether there are gaps you can fill.
• Cluster related keywords together and develop a content strategy that covers multiple branching areas of a topic deeply.
• High search volume often means high competition. Allocate your resources carefully between acquiring lower competition positions and fighting for a slice of competitive traffic.
• Building a robust catalog of content focused on long-tail keywords can help you acquire the authority to compete in more competitive SERPs for related topics.

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Briefing SEO Content

Once you have performed your research and identified the intents you must target, it’s time to plan the content.

SEO professionals may not have the required knowledge to create content that demonstrates experience and expertise – unless they’re writing about SEO.

They’re SEO specialists, so if your website is about finance or razor blades, someone else will need to provide the knowledge.

Briefing is critical because it allows the SEO team to communicate all that hard work and research to the person or team creating the content. A successful brief should inform the content creators:

• The target keyword strategy, with suggestions or a template for the title and subheadings.
• The purpose of the content for the user: What the user should learn or be able to accomplish.
• The purpose of the content for the business: Where it falls into the marketing strategy and relevant KPIs.
• Details such as length, style guide or voice notes, and key pieces of information to be included.

Creating SEO Content

Your research should guide the format of your writing.

Remember, intent impacts the usability of different types of content. Prioritize the information most likely to solve the user’s intent.

You can do this by providing summaries, tables of contents, videos, pictures, skip links, and, most importantly, headings.

Use The Title & Headings To Target Keywords & Organize Information

The title of a page is your primary keyword opportunity. It’s also the first thing users will see on a SERP, which impacts CTR. Match the title to your target query and think about effectively describing the content to entice a click. But don’t misrepresent your page for clicks.

Your primary responsibility in SEO content is to set expectations and then deliver on them. Don’t set if you can’t deliver.

HTML heading formats help users navigate the page by breaking up blocks of text and indicating where certain topics are covered. They’re critical to your on-page SEO, so use your keywords.

Expectations are as true for headings as for titles. Headings should be descriptive and useful. Prioritize setting an expectation for what the user will find on that part of the page and then delivering on that expectation.

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Get To The Point

Whether content should be long or short is subjective to its purpose. All SEO content should be as short as possible while achieving its goals. “As short as possible” could mean 4,000 words.

If you need 4,000 words to achieve your goal, then use them. But don’t add any more than you need.

This is a call to avoid rambling, especially in introductions. Do you really need to cite the projected growth of an industry just to prove it’s worth talking about?

Not unless you’re writing a news story about that growth. Cut that sentence and the link to Statista from your introduction. (No shade, Statista, you rock.)

Features like skip links can also help with this. Give users the option to skim and skip directly to what they need.

Use Internal Links To Connect Your Pages Together & Provide Further Reading

Internal links are the bedrock of SEO content strategies. They are how you organize related pages and guide users around your website. They also spread the SEO value of your pages to the pages they’re connected to.

In the keyword research section, we suggested that you create clusters of keywords and topics to write about – this is why. You build authority by covering a topic in-depth and creating multiple pages exploring it and all its subtopics.

You should link between pages related to one another at contextually important points in the content. You can use this tactic to direct the SEO power of multiple pages to one important page for your strategy or your business.

Contextually relevant links that properly set expectations for what the user will find also contribute to a good site experience.

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Use Personal Experiences And Unique Expertise To Stand Out

AI presents numerous challenges for SEOs. Anyone can quickly create content at scale using generative AI tools.

The tools can replicate competitors, synthesize content together from myriad sources, and enable breakneck publishing paces. This poses two core problems:

• How do you stand out with so much AI content out there?
• How do you build trust in audiences looking for legitimate experts?

For now, the best answer is to lean into the E-E-A-T principles that Google prioritizes.

• Tell human stories with your content that demonstrate your experience and expertise.
• Use Oberstein’s “situational content” principle, mentioned earlier in this article, to connect with your audience’s experiences and needs.
• Ensure that content is created by verifiable experts, especially if that content involves topics that can impact the audience’s well-being (YMYL.)

SEO Content Is Both A Strategy & An Individual Interaction

It’s easy to focus on what you need from users: what keyword you want to rank for, what you want users to click, and what actions you want them to take.

But all of that falls apart if you don’t honor the individual interaction between your website and a user who needs something.

Audience-first content is SEO content. Content is a core function of SEO because it’s the basis of how humans and algorithms understand your website.

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Featured Image: Art_Photo/Shutterstock

In the world of SEO, URL parameters pose a significant problem.

While developers and data analysts may appreciate their utility, these query strings are an SEO headache.

Countless parameter combinations can split a single user intent across thousands of URL variations. This can cause complications for crawling, indexing, visibility and, ultimately, lead to lower traffic.

The issue is we can’t simply wish them away, which means it’s crucial to master how to manage URL parameters in an SEO-friendly way.

To do so, we will explore:

What Are URL Parameters?

URL parameters, also known as query strings or URI variables, are the portion of a URL that follows the ‘?’ symbol. They are comprised of a key and a value pair, separated by an ‘=’ sign. Multiple parameters can be added to a single page when separated by an ‘&’.

The most common use cases for parameters are:

• Tracking – For example ?utm_medium=social, ?sessionid=123 or ?affiliateid=abc
• Reordering – For example ?sort=lowest-price, ?order=highest-rated or ?so=latest
• Filtering – For example ?type=widget, colour=purple or ?price-range=20-50
• Identifying – For example ?product=small-purple-widget, categoryid=124 or itemid=24AU
• Paginating – For example, ?page=2, ?p=2 or viewItems=10-30
• Searching – For example, ?query=users-query, ?q=users-query or ?search=drop-down-option
• Translating – For example, ?lang=fr or ?language=de

SEO Issues With URL Parameters

1. Parameters Create Duplicate Content

Often, URL parameters make no significant change to the content of a page.

A re-ordered version of the page is often not so different from the original. A page URL with tracking tags or a session ID is identical to the original.

For example, the following URLs would all return a collection of widgets.

• Static URL: https://www.example.com/widgets
• Tracking parameter: https://www.example.com/widgets?sessionID=32764
• Reordering parameter: https://www.example.com/widgets?sort=latest
• Identifying parameter: https://www.example.com?category=widgets
• Searching parameter: https://www.example.com/products?search=widget

That’s quite a few URLs for what is effectively the same content – now imagine this over every category on your site. It can really add up.

The challenge is that search engines treat every parameter-based URL as a new page. So, they see multiple variations of the same page, all serving duplicate content and all targeting the same search intent or semantic topic.

While such duplication is unlikely to cause a website to be completely filtered out of the search results, it does lead to keyword cannibalization and could downgrade Google’s view of your overall site quality, as these additional URLs add no real value.

2. Parameters Reduce Crawl Efficacy

Crawling redundant parameter pages distracts Googlebot, reducing your site’s ability to index SEO-relevant pages and increasing server load.

Google sums up this point perfectly.

“Overly complex URLs, especially those containing multiple parameters, can cause a problems for crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site.

As a result, Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site.”

3. Parameters Split Page Ranking Signals

If you have multiple permutations of the same page content, links and social shares may be coming in on various versions.

This dilutes your ranking signals. When you confuse a crawler, it becomes unsure which of the competing pages to index for the search query.

4. Parameters Make URLs Less Clickable

Let’s face it: parameter URLs are unsightly. They’re hard to read. They don’t seem as trustworthy. As such, they are slightly less likely to be clicked.

This may impact page performance. Not only because CTR influences rankings, but also because it’s less clickable in AI chatbots, social media, in emails, when copy-pasted into forums, or anywhere else the full URL may be displayed.

While this may only have a fractional impact on a single page’s amplification, every tweet, like, share, email, link, and mention matters for the domain.

Poor URL readability could contribute to a decrease in brand engagement.

Assess The Extent Of Your Parameter Problem

It’s important to know every parameter used on your website. But chances are your developers don’t keep an up-to-date list.

So how do you find all the parameters that need handling? Or understand how search engines crawl and index such pages? Know the value they bring to users?

Follow these five steps:

• Run a crawler: With a tool like Screaming Frog, you can search for “?” in the URL.
• Review your log files: See if Googlebot is crawling parameter-based URLs.
• Look in the Google Search Console page indexing report: In the samples of index and relevant non-indexed exclusions, search for ‘?’ in the URL.
• Search with site: inurl: advanced operators: Know how Google is indexing the parameters you found by putting the key in a site:example.com inurl:key combination query.
• Look in Google Analytics all pages report: Search for “?” to see how each of the parameters you found are used by users. Be sure to check that URL query parameters have not been excluded in the view setting.

Armed with this data, you can now decide how to best handle each of your website’s parameters.

SEO Solutions To Tame URL Parameters

You have six tools in your SEO arsenal to deal with URL parameters on a strategic level.

Limit Parameter-based URLs

A simple review of how and why parameters are generated can provide an SEO quick win.

You will often find ways to reduce the number of parameter URLs and thus minimize the negative SEO impact. There are four common issues to begin your review.

1. Eliminate Unnecessary Parameters

Ask your developer for a list of every website’s parameters and their functions. Chances are, you will discover parameters that no longer perform a valuable function.

For example, users can be better identified by cookies than sessionIDs. Yet the sessionID parameter may still exist on your website as it was used historically.

Or you may discover that a filter in your faceted navigation is rarely applied by your users.

Any parameters caused by technical debt should be eliminated immediately.

2. Prevent Empty Values

URL parameters should be added to a URL only when they have a function. Don’t permit parameter keys to be added if the value is blank.

In the above example, key2 and key3 add no value, both literally and figuratively.

3. Use Keys Only Once

Avoid applying multiple parameters with the same parameter name and a different value.

For multi-select options, it is better to combine the values after a single key.

4. Order URL Parameters

If the same URL parameter is rearranged, the pages are interpreted by search engines as equal.

As such, parameter order doesn’t matter from a duplicate content perspective. But each of those combinations burns crawl budget and split ranking signals.

Avoid these issues by asking your developer to write a script to always place parameters in a consistent order, regardless of how the user selected them.

In my opinion, you should start with any translating parameters, followed by identifying, then pagination, then layering on filtering and reordering or search parameters, and finally tracking.

Pros:

• Ensures more efficient crawling.
• Reduces duplicate content issues.
• Consolidates ranking signals to fewer pages.
• Suitable for all parameter types.

Cons:

• Moderate technical implementation time.

Rel=”Canonical” Link Attribute

The rel=”canonical” link attribute calls out that a page has identical or similar content to another. This encourages search engines to consolidate the ranking signals to the URL specified as canonical.

You can rel=canonical your parameter-based URLs to your SEO-friendly URL for tracking, identifying, or reordering parameters.

But this tactic is not suitable when the parameter page content is not close enough to the canonical, such as pagination, searching, translating, or some filtering parameters.

Pros:

• Relatively easy technical implementation.
• Very likely to safeguard against duplicate content issues.
• Consolidates ranking signals to the canonical URL.

Cons:

• Wastes crawling on parameter pages.
• Not suitable for all parameter types.
• Interpreted by search engines as a strong hint, not a directive.

Meta Robots Noindex Tag

Set a noindex directive for any parameter-based page that doesn’t add SEO value. This tag will prevent search engines from indexing the page.

URLs with a “noindex” tag are also likely to be crawled less frequently and if it’s present for a long time will eventually lead Google to nofollow the page’s links.

Pros:

• Relatively easy technical implementation.
• Very likely to safeguard against duplicate content issues.
• Suitable for all parameter types you do not wish to be indexed.
• Removes existing parameter-based URLs from the index.

Cons:

• Won’t prevent search engines from crawling URLs, but will encourage them to do so less frequently.
• Doesn’t consolidate ranking signals.
• Interpreted by search engines as a strong hint, not a directive.

Robots.txt Disallow

The robots.txt file is what search engines look at first before crawling your site. If they see something is disallowed, they won’t even go there.

You can use this file to block crawler access to every parameter based URL (with Disallow: /*?*) or only to specific query strings you don’t want to be indexed.

Pros:

• Simple technical implementation.
• Allows more efficient crawling.
• Avoids duplicate content issues.
• Suitable for all parameter types you do not wish to be crawled.

Cons:

• Doesn’t consolidate ranking signals.
• Doesn’t remove existing URLs from the index.

Move From Dynamic To Static URLs

Many people think the optimal way to handle URL parameters is to simply avoid them in the first place.

After all, subfolders surpass parameters to help Google understand site structure and static, keyword-based URLs have always been a cornerstone of on-page SEO.

To achieve this, you can use server-side URL rewrites to convert parameters into subfolder URLs.

For example, the URL:

www.example.com/view-product?id=482794

Would become:

www.example.com/widgets/purple

This approach works well for descriptive keyword-based parameters, such as those that identify categories, products, or filters for search engine-relevant attributes. It is also effective for translated content.

But it becomes problematic for non-keyword-relevant elements of faceted navigation, such as an exact price. Having such a filter as a static, indexable URL offers no SEO value.

It’s also an issue for searching parameters, as every user-generated query would create a static page that vies for ranking against the canonical – or worse presents to crawlers low-quality content pages whenever a user has searched for an item you don’t offer.

It’s somewhat odd when applied to pagination (although not uncommon due to WordPress), which would give a URL such as

www.example.com/widgets/purple/page2

Very odd for reordering, which would give a URL such as

www.example.com/widgets/purple/lowest-price

And is often not a viable option for tracking. Google Analytics will not acknowledge a static version of the UTM parameter.

More to the point: Replacing dynamic parameters with static URLs for things like pagination, on-site search box results, or sorting does not address duplicate content, crawl budget, or internal link equity dilution.

Having all the combinations of filters from your faceted navigation as indexable URLs often results in thin content issues. Especially if you offer multi-select filters.

Many SEO pros argue it’s possible to provide the same user experience without impacting the URL. For example, by using POST rather than GET requests to modify the page content. Thus, preserving the user experience and avoiding SEO problems.

But stripping out parameters in this manner would remove the possibility for your audience to bookmark or share a link to that specific page – and is obviously not feasible for tracking parameters and not optimal for pagination.

The crux of the matter is that for many websites, completely avoiding parameters is simply not possible if you want to provide the ideal user experience. Nor would it be best practice SEO.

So we are left with this. For parameters that you don’t want to be indexed in search results (paginating, reordering, tracking, etc) implement them as query strings. For parameters that you do want to be indexed, use static URL paths.

Pros:

• Shifts crawler focus from parameter-based to static URLs which have a higher likelihood to rank.

Cons:

• Significant investment of development time for URL rewrites and 301 redirects.
• Doesn’t prevent duplicate content issues.
• Doesn’t consolidate ranking signals.
• Not suitable for all parameter types.
• May lead to thin content issues.
• Doesn’t always provide a linkable or bookmarkable URL.

Best Practices For URL Parameter Handling For SEO

So which of these six SEO tactics should you implement?

The answer can’t be all of them.

Not only would that create unnecessary complexity, but often, the SEO solutions actively conflict with one another.

For example, if you implement robots.txt disallow, Google would not be able to see any meta noindex tags. You also shouldn’t combine a meta noindex tag with a rel=canonical link attribute.

Google’s John Mueller, Gary Ilyes, and Lizzi Sassman couldn’t even decide on an approach. In a Search Off The Record episode, they discussed the challenges that parameters present for crawling.

They even suggest bringing back a parameter handling tool in Google Search Console. Google, if you are reading this, please do bring it back!

What becomes clear is there isn’t one perfect solution. There are occasions when crawling efficiency is more important than consolidating authority signals.

Ultimately, what’s right for your website will depend on your priorities.

Personally, I take the following plan of attack for SEO-friendly parameter handling:

• Research user intents to understand what parameters should be search engine friendly, static URLs.
• Implement effective pagination handling using a ?page= parameter.
• For all remaining parameter-based URLs, block crawling with a robots.txt disallow and add a noindex tag as backup.
• Double-check that no parameter-based URLs are being submitted in the XML sitemap.

No matter what parameter handling strategy you choose to implement, be sure to document the impact of your efforts on KPIs.

More resources: 

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