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."
I did ping Google about this but I have yet to hear back.
Forum discussion at X, LinkedIn, Reddit and Google Analytics Forums.
Update: John Mueller from Google posted a follow up on this over here - he wrote:
I followed up on this with the team, and here's roughly what's happening.These URL parameters are added for Merchant Center "auto-tagging" (there's more about it over here), when a site-owner has activated that feature. They're used for conversion tracking for merchants. We plan to update the help page as appropriate once this rolls out more.
They're added in search directly, with unique IDs using the "srsltid" parameter that you mentioned. The URLs are not indexed or crawled like that. It's not a new setup, we've used this for quite some time for example in the shopping tab. We've now expanded it to traditional search results.
This doesn't affect crawling, indexing, or ranking - it's basically just for analytics for merchants. While not necessary, you can use the link rel=canonical element pointing at the preferred URL for indexing as you normally would. If you don't want it, you can just turn off the setting (though it seems useful to me!). In Search Console, you mostly see the old usage of the parameter, we try to filter it out for the normal search results.
