odd URL parameters generating duplicate pages

  • I am working for a client who has a WordPress Divi site with a bunch of articles. I noticed one article’s permalink was indexed on Google but ranking very low when I searched for a long sentence in the article. Instead of seeing the article, I saw several redundant variations of the article on his site, either duplicating the article, or combining it with other articles and serving them up as a single page. I’m worried this duplicate content is using up his crawl budget on Google and other important articles aren’t getting indexed. Assuming his website is books.com, here would be the relevant URLs:

    It’s possible some sort of URL rewriting is happening, since going to https://books.com/page/4 displays the contents of the home page instead of some article. I have also noticed that Elegant Themes uses “p=1” or “p=2” etc for a pagination scheme, to go to previous or next articles in an archive.

    Does anyone know how to turn off all these variations of the same articles so we’re left with just the canonical, permalink versions? What do the following URL-appended parameters mean?

    • p=5
    • limit=15
    • et_blog
Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    I’m no SEO expert, but seeing as no one else has replied…

    If there is no actual page/4 page, the source of where ever Googlebot is finding such URLs needs to be corrected.

    AFAIK Google bot generally doesn’t care about query strings, it cares about what the canonical URL is. Having many extraneous URLs leading to the same canonical could delay how long before Googlebot can check them all, but I’d expect the canonical URL so found would be placed high in its priorities over query string variations.

    If the page you want ranked better is on the sitemap registered through search console, it’s low ranking is likely due to something else besides exhausting a crawl budget. Googlebot will eventually crawl everything it can find. Have you tried using one of the SEO oriented plugins?

    This query vars you asked about are not default WP query vars, they appear to be theme related, so you should seek clarification through the theme’s dedicated support channel.

    Thread Starter shouthaus

    (@shouthaus)

    Thanks, that’s super-helpful! I’ll check out the theme documentation and look into the sitemap settings in GSC.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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