show query strings might not be best for SEO?

Question

Hi,

I noticed there is a "show" query string for each answer in a question, that basically links to the same place.

https://domain.com/18/url-title-here?show=19#a19

So if a question has 20 answers, isn't that 20 different urls that point to the same page? From what I know about SEO, that would be duplicate content, and penalized with google.

Looks like the anchor is already there, #a19 - so why do we need it in the query string as well?

I read up a bit on it

https://northcutt.com/seo/seo-auditing/query-string-seo/

Query strings create duplicate content when the addition of a query string to a URL makes no change or no significant change to the content of the page. A re-sorted or filtered version of a page is hardly different from the original, and a version of a page with URL tags for tracking is identical to the original. Duplicates like these aren't likely to pick up an all-out penalty, but they could hurt your site's quality score which will diminish ranking potential.

Thanks

Answer 1

Each page has a canonical meta tag.

The recent URL does not matter for search engines.

Comments

Ahhh yes, I forgot to check for canonical tags - thanks - sorry