Beginning late July 2024, many users have complained about Google Search listing URLs with the srsltid parameter. Google is now indexing and showing hundreds of thousands of these URLs in search results with this parameter attached.
I first noticed this while reviewing the keywords I was tracking for my client in SEMRush:
So I began examining the search results using a query like [inurl:srsltid -intext:srsltid]. To my surprise, I found hundreds of thousands of URLs featuring the srsltid parameter.
There have been several complaints about this on Reddit and Google Analytics forums.
Many SEOs are concerned that the srsltid parameter could lead to problems such as duplicate content, inefficient use of crawl budget, and inaccurate data in tracking tools like Google Analytics 4 and SEMRush.
Another concern for SEOs is that even when pages have proper canonical tags, the URLs with srsltid parameters are the ones appearing in search results. Could this indicate that the canonical attribution system is not functioning correctly?
To learn more about srsltid parameter issue, check out the discussion at X, LinkedIn, Reddit and Google Analytics Forums.