In recent weeks, there has been an increase in complaints about Google Search listing URLs with the srsltid URL parameter appended as the canonical URL in Google Search. In fact, Google now matches hundreds of thousands of these URLs and serves them in search results under this parameter.
Kevin on X asked me about this on August 5th: “Why do some of my clients see the Google Merchant Parameter ( ?srsltid=) in their organic search results for blogs?”
Serhii Koksharov wrote this in his blog and documented the problem in more detail.
He said if you do a Google search (inurl:srsltid -intext:srsltid) you will find hundreds of thousands of examples. After that you can just search for the title of one of those entries to see if Google actually serves the page and lists the URL of the page with the srsltid parameter. And Google does that.
Here are some examples:
This is all part of the Google Analytics and Merchant Center integration, which “appends the srsltid parameter to links generated by Google Merchant Center in organic shopping results (e.g. www.example.com?srsltid=123xyz).” It was added back in February 2022.
There are a number of complaints about this on Reddit and the Google Analytics forums. Brodie Clark also posted about the issue on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. Brodie wrote: “If you’re seeing some unusual looking URLs ranking for your site or appearing in your ranking tracking reports, now you know why. This seems to be unintentional and so will likely be fixed by Google soon.” It’s not fixed yet.
Serhii Koksharov adds: “If you notice srsltid in your URLs, don’t worry. This is a common problem now. However, make sure you use canonicals tags on your site to avoid duplicates from occurring.”
I have contacted Google about this but have not received a response yet.
Forum discussion in the X, LinkedIn, Reddit and Google Analytics forums.
