: Why Google does not fetch some $_GET parameters in URL? I have StackOverflow style URL's in my site, like mysite.com/article/42/the-article. However, when I search for the article, I see that

@Eichhorn148

Stack Exchange sites redirect when the URL is truncated, or the title of the post has change.

For example the URL for this page is: /questions/50697/why-google-does-not-fetch-some-get-parameters-in-url. You can check that both /questions/50697/ and /questions/50697/some-other-title redirect to the correct canonical URL.

If you are not doing "URL Canonicalization" to tell Googlebot which URL is the correct one, then Google may choose any of the possible URLs. Even worse, this can sometimes lead to massive duplicate content problems.

URL canonicalization can be implemented in two ways:


With 301 redirects (like stack exchange does)
With meta canonical links (like Nicholas suggests)

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@Sent6035632

I recommend that you add the canonical form of the URL to each web page:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://mysite.com/article/42/">


You may also with to do a permanent redirect to the longer URL if you get a request to the shorter one (with the L flag if using mod_rewrite, and before you do the internal rewrite to index.php).

Secondly, I suggest that you add a sitemap and notify Google of it's existence. Include the long forms of the URL for each article. That just makes sure Google knows about them, and reduces the time it will take Google to (re-)crawl your whole site.

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