Take the 2-minute tour ×

I have a website which i have indexed on google for example (like 15 days ago).

some of my pages pass arguments like:


suddently i saw that passing arguments like this isn't good for SEO purposes and started using htaccess rewrite.

and changed the arguments to like this:


now my site on google still shows as i showed at link number 1

what should i do?

i thought i should wait for the search engine to crawl my site again but nothing happened.

thanks in advanced, Din

share|improve this question
Query strings are not bad for SEO. –  John Conde Feb 7 '11 at 16:36
but it is still makes a long and uncomfortable to write links.. –  dinbrca Feb 7 '11 at 16:41

2 Answers 2

The proper way to handle this is to use a canonical link in your header. The syntax goes like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.site.com/path-you-want" />

This lets Google know which URL you prefer using for a page.

This particularly useful to de-dupliacte pages as you may have multiple addresses that show the same content. A classic example are listings where one parameter controls the sort order (ex: &sort=price). That way if links to different sort orders exist they still get counted as multiple links to the same page.

share|improve this answer

Add a redirect in .htaccess for the URL's the Google has. There is no reason for them to get rid of them because they still go to legit pages but with the redirect next time Google crawls it will see that the URL has changed.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


