URL Parameter
URL parameters are key-value pairs appended to a URL after a `?` — '?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=spring2026' — used for tracking, filtering, sorting, pagination, and session state.
In context
URL parameters create SEO challenges because they can produce thousands of crawlable variants of the same canonical content, wasting crawl budget and risking duplicate-content issues. Mitigation: declare canonical tags on parameterised URLs pointing to the parameter-free master, use robots.txt to block crawl on tracking-only parameters, configure parameter handling in Search Console only when necessary, prefer hash fragments (#) over query strings for in-page state. Good faceted-navigation handling is one of the highest-leverage technical SEO areas for ecommerce.
A Canadian retailer's faceted navigation generated 100k+ parameterised URLs; consolidating with strict canonicals pointing to the parameter-free category pages and blocking sort-only parameters in robots.txt recovered most of the wasted crawl budget.
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