I’m working with a client who has a massive WordPress site. All their internal links have these old tracking ID parameters (from a system they used to track paths and customer journeys).
We’re in the process of stripping these out and redirecting to the proper canonical URLs. I’m curious though – how much do you think this kind of setup might have hurt SEO? I assume Google is smart enough to figure out the structure even with the extra junk in the URLs, but would removing the tracking parameters actually improve SEO? Or could it somehow hurt rankings?
This is the first time I’ve seen internal traffic tracked this way, so I’d love to hear any insights.
It depends. If you had redirects and canonicals set up properly, it might not have been too bad. But without those in place, it could have hurt quite a bit.
Will removing the tracking parameters improve SEO?
Yes, I’d expect to see some improvement after cleaning it up.
Could removing the parameters negatively impact SEO?
In the long run, this change shouldn’t hurt SEO at all. It’s more likely to help than harm.
If the site doesn’t get a ton of traffic, the crawl budget might be low. That means Google has to crawl all those duplicate pages with ID tags, which can slow things down and make it harder to consolidate authority.
If the site gets a lot of traffic, Google probably crawled those pages already and associated them with the correct canonicals. It can still hurt, but not as much.
Either way, stripping out the extra parameters is a good move.