URL parameters and tracking: Crawl Audit check 69

Short answer: parameters are the part of an address after the ?, such as ?utm_source=newsletter or ?gclid=.... They're useful for tracking, but each different set makes a different address for the same page. Check 69 warns when the address you audited has any parameters, as a reminder to make sure those versions point their canonical at the clean address.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: the audited address has no query parameters.
• Warning: it has some.

The check looks only at the address you entered, after redirects. It doesn't crawl your other parameter versions. If you audited a link copied from an advert or an email, you'll see this warning; run it again on the clean address too.

What Google says

• Google's URL structure guide: "Use as few parameters as you can. Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters (meaning, parameters that don't change the content)."
• Search Console used to have a URL Parameters tool. Google removed it in 2022, saying "Google's crawlers will learn how to deal with URL parameters automatically."
• For more control, the same post points to robots.txt rules. A canonical tag on each page (check 36) tells Google which address you prefer.

How to handle parameters

1. Tracking parameters (utm_, gclid, fbclid): keep them for your analytics, and make sure the page's canonical is the clean address.
2. Sort and filter parameters (?sort=price): Google's pagination guide suggests keeping these out of the index with noindex, or out of the crawl with robots.txt.
3. Parameters that change the content, such as a page number: those are separate pages, and should be self-canonical (check 68).

On devmarde.com

On 3 October we loaded devmarde.com/?utm_source=test and devmarde.com/blog?utm_source=test&gclid=abc. Both pages named the clean address as canonical, https://devmarde.com and https://devmarde.com/blog.

On your platform

The test is the same everywhere: add ?utm_source=test to one of your pages, open view-source, and search for canonical. If it shows the address with the parameter, fix the canonical in your platform or SEO plugin settings. In Next.js, set alternates.canonical to the path without the query string.

Sources

• Google Search Central, URL structure best practices and Pagination (both updated 10 December 2025), checked 3 October 2026.
• Google Search Central blog, Spring cleaning: the URL Parameters tool, 28 March 2022.