While checking the webmaster tools for my wordpress blog, I found out that there are numerous pages which are showing either duplicate content or else not found error.
Most of these page (1000+) were normal url’s with ?cid=xxx to their end.
This can be dangerous for your blog’s health overall along with other factors if left untreated.
To remove these url’s from causing duplicate or 404 error pages on your website, remove them by going to parameter handling settings in google webmaster tools.
Parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools
Dynamic websites, forexample the ones created using WordPress use a lot of parameters for various reasons. A lot of those parameters may be useless for Google and for search engine optimization. In fact some of them can have a negative affect on the seo and should be managed accordingly and removed from being indexed by asking google to ignore them or let it decide itself what to do about them.
Some of the common parameters include:
- cid
- instance
- sort
- alpha_filter_id
- re
- action
- main_page
- cPath
There can be a lot of other parameters too depending upon the platform and framework you’re using to build your website.
Make sure that google isn’t taking it as negative and it isn’t affecting your seo negatively, specially cid xxx (cid with any numerical value with it, it’s comment id imho).