Over the past couple of weeks, there has been an increase in complaints around Google Search listing URLs with the srsltid URL parameter tagged along to the URL, as the canonical URL in Google Search. In fact, Google matches on hundreds of thousands of these URLs now and does serve them in the search results under that 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 up on his blog documenting the issue in more detail.
He said if you do a [inurl:srsltid -intext:srsltid] Google Search, you will find hundreds of thousands of examples. After you do that, then you can just search for the title of any of those listings to see if Google actually does serve the page and list the page’s URL with the srsltid parameter. And Google does.
Here are some examples:
Now, this is all part of the Google Analytics and Merchant Center integration where “The srsltid parameter is appended 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 Google Analytics Forums. Brodie Clark also posted about the issue on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago. Brodie wrote, “If you see some ususual looking URLs ranking for your site or appearing in your rank tracking reports, you now know why. This feels unintentional, so will likely be fixed soon by Google.” It is not fixed yet.
Serhii Koksharov add, “If you’ll notice srsltid in your urls, don’t worry. It’s common problem now. But make sure you are using canonicals tags on your website to avoid appearing duplicates.”
