"How Will Google Interpret Links to URLs Ending with a Campaign Tag?"

Matt Cutts from Google discusses how Google might consider URLs with parameters passed in the query string compared to their root URL.

So what exactly is the impact of URL parameters on Google's considering their base URL?

"Will google interpret links to URLs ending with a campaign tag like www.example.com/?hl=en as a link to www.example.com or to a completely different page? What about the SEO effect of inbound links?"

Find the answer below.

So the Crawl Team—the team that really does the core indexing—they do a great job of canonicalizing, which is picking from different URLs and combining them together in the right way.

So if you're using sort of standard URL endings—URL parameter tags, tracking tags, stuff like that—oftentimes we'll be able to detect that those are the same page and they should really be combined in some way.

If that's not the case, we'd like to talk about the the KISS rule—the "Keep It Simple Stupid" rule.

If you don't trust a search engine to get it right, you do have a lot of different options:

• So you can always, for example, use rel="canonical" whenever you land our a particular page.

• If it's a tracking URL, you don't want it in the index at all. In theory you could record that particular landing page was hit on the server and then do a 301 [redirect] to whatever the final page is going to be.

• We also provide a free tool in Google's webmaster console at http://www.google.com/webmasters that basically let you say "these URL parameters matter, and these URL parameters don't matter". So when you see a URL with this particular set of parameters, you can strip these parameters out and you'll still get the same content.

So if you do use something unstandard or you see it had been an issue—may be you see, you know, the URL showing up twice in Google search results—that is something where I'd recommend checking out our URL parameter tool, or considering using rel="canonical" or a 301 redirect.

Hope that helps.