Alright, fellow digital daredevils, let’s talk about URL parameters. You’ve seen them before: those little strings of code that hitch a ride on your URL after a question mark (?). They look like harmless gibberish, but in the SEO universe, they’re equal parts magic trick and chaos gremlin.
At Web Drool, we don’t shy away from these little troublemakers, we tame them, teach them tricks, and make them work in your favor. Because when you’ve got a brand to rocket-launch into the digital cosmos, even the smallest details can mean the difference between meh rankings and glorious first-page domination.
A URL parameter is basically a “key=value” pairing that tells your website to do something specific. Like:
https://yourwebsite.com/shoes?color=blue&size=9
Everything before the question mark is your squeaky-clean base URL. Everything after is your parameter party, color=blue is one guest, size=9 is another, and the & between them is the DJ keeping the beats flowing.
Some folks call the whole chunk after the question mark a “query string” and the individual bits “parameters.” But honestly? That’s developer-speak. Here in the SEO wild west, we just call them by their true name: tiny pieces of code with the power to make or break your site’s performance.
First, you’ve got active parameters. These are the show-offs. They change what’s on the page for your visitor. Choose “blue” in a product filter, hit “sort by price,” or click “next page” on a blog, and bam, the URL changes. These are handy for user experience but can cause a duplicate content nightmare if you don’t keep them in check.
Then there are passive parameters, the silent ninjas. They don’t change the page at all, but they’re quietly collecting intel. Think utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid_social. They tell you where your traffic came from, which ad brought them in, and whether your latest campaign was a smash hit or a flop.
If you leave parameters to their own devices, they will multiply like rabbits. Suddenly you’ve got dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different URLs leading to the exact same page.
And not shockingly, search engines hate that. They don’t know which one to rank, so they might rank none of them. Your link equity gets spread thin. Your crawl budget gets chewed up on useless duplicates instead of fresh content. And sometimes, you even end up competing with yourself for the same keyword (cannibalization, not good).
We don’t mess around with duplicate chaos. Here’s how we keep our parameters from turning into SEO gremlins:
This tells Google, “Ignore the wannabes, this is the one true page.” That way, all ranking power flows into your chosen champion instead of being split between clones.
That could mean rules in robots.txt, parameter handling in Search Console, or (our favorite) structuring your site so that you don’t even need excessive parameters in the first place.
Internal links? Always to the canonical URL. Parameters? Always in the same order. That way Google doesn’t get confused and think ?size=9&color=blue is a totally different page from ?color=blue&size=9.
We use UTMs for analytics, but we strip them out when they’re no longer needed. Because the only thing worse than a messy URL is an indexed messy URL.
At Web Drool, we don’t just “manage” parameters. We turn them into performance-boosting, user-delighting, analytics-loving little SEO soldiers. The goal is simple:
When we say we catapult brands into the digital spotlight, we mean every last part of their online presence, right down to the punctuation marks in their URLs. Because in SEO, even the small stuff can make a big, glorious difference.