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You may have noticed that your organic listings have a new parameter called srsltid=. It took me a while to figure out why this is happening.

Hint: it has nothing to do with your developers or your site, so no need to bother them.

As of this writing (October 7, 2024) this is happening to every site that has product listings in the Google Merchant Center and has “auto-tagging” turned on.

This was first observed around August. A lot of people (incorrectly) attributed this to the August Core Update, but it really has to do with new features launched by the Google Shopping team that were announced in July.

Here’s the “official” explanation by John Mueller on a LinkedIn thread.

While I love John Mueller and follow everything he says, here’s the problem with his answer.

The srsltid= parameter is generated upon *impression*. That means every time I refresh my SERP, Google appends a unique parameter to my ORGANIC listing.

I’ve been reading a lot of speculation on other SEO sites about the problems this

Here’s why.

1) If a user clicks on an SEO result and then copies and pastes the URL to social media, Google Merchant Center gets a ton of attribution that isn’t theirs.

This is actually happening today. See https://x.com/search?q=srsltid as an example.

Here’s what happens. Google’s Merchant Center team made the decision to place tracking URLs on ALL organic results, not just Shopping results.

That’s fine, except when people start to copy and paste URLs. Which is what people do.

I have no idea what was going through their heads. Maybe in their minds a “Google click is a Google click”.

But no, a Google Shopping click is a Google Shopping click.

A Google Organic click is something completely different and should be handled by the Google Shopping team no differently than, say, a Facebook click, a Instagram click, or a Reddit click.

2) Google itself tells us not to use session-specific IDs nor “irrelevant parameters in the URL, such as referral parameters“.

This is SEO 101. Google Merchant Center injecting this URL into every organic result has the effect of “creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site.”

While John Mueller says that this query parameter “doesn’t affect crawling, indexation, or ranking”, that may be true when you view Google and Googlebot in a vacuum, but it is absolutely not true in the real world.

  • Crawling is absolutely affected when Google sees thousands of copied and pasted URLs with query parameters and has to figure out what to do with them.
  • While Indexation is not affected on a theoretical level (Google is evidently still indexing the canonical URL but dynamically generating a new srsltid parameter on the fly) the practical effect, again, is that Googlebot has to figure out what to do with thousands of auto-generated URLs that users copy and paste as links.
  • As for ranking, many of us have already seen anecdotally that canonicals, like 301s, do not pass full PageRank vs. a permanent, direct link. I would love to trust John here, but past history isn’t comforting.

3) This change renders the rel=canonical tag meaningless.

The whole point of the rel=canonical tag is to AVOID a situation when multiple variations of a URL—usually an unforced error on the site’s part—are served by Google.

Here, Google is the one committing the unforced error, deliberately serving up a different URL for each organic click.

4) John says that you can turn this feature off in Google Merchant Center, but then hedges by saying “though it seems useful to me!)

I get it…John probably knows that this was a royal screw-up on the part of the Google Shopping team, and I’m sure he know the implications that this will have on sites for the reasons I mentioned above.

But he has to maintain a unified face to the world.

In the meantime, the Merchant Center documentation says that it’s a “required feature”. As the SEO guy, I’m in an awkward situation of having to tell my paid search team to shut off a feature that everyone in Google (including John) says “is useful”.

Thoughts

Look, I get it. The Google Shopping team wants to get around the problem that recent changes in privacy regulations and cookie policies have caused.

But hijacking Google’s crown jewels—Google Organic—is not cool. It essentially treats Google Organic as a subordinate “feature” to be manipulated at the pleasure of the Google Merchant Center team.

For years, Google maintained a wall of separation between paid search and organic search. This seems to upend all of that.

Append what you want to my Shopping, Local, News, or Images listing. But the organic listing should be sacrosanct.

I do appreciate that John and the rest of the Google team have to circle the wagons and present a unified front to the SEO community and to the world.

But this was a screw-up of huge proportions from product managers who didn’t consider what would happen in the real world when they started fiddling with Google organic listings.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Google put a feature out which caused millions of Webmasters to have to scramble when the feature went in, and then to scramble again when the feature was pulled (remember rel=prev and rel=next, hashbangs for AJAX crawling, and so many more?)

In the past, Google did have full transparency about these things. It would be nice in this case if there was a little more communication about the path to fix it before a billion unwanted srsltid= parameters litter the Web.

Conclusion

So, if you’re a Webmaster and you see the srsltid= parameter starting to appear in your inbound links, here’s what to do:

  1. Go to Google Merchant Center and shut off Auto-Tagging
  2. I’m trying to figure out what they mean by If you’re unable to use auto-tagging, you can use manual tagging to import Google Ads data in Google Analytics. If I figure out how to do this, I’ll go ahead and update this post.

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