Does "answered" or "commented" url ending with ?show=xx serve any useful purpose?

Question

Google is indexing a lot of duplicate pages for same questions with urls ending with  ?show=xx#xx".

I have modified the code to remove ?show=xx, while keeping the #xx at the end. I don't see any difference in site functionality.

Does ?show=xx links serve any function?

Answer 1

Yes, the "show" parameter is used to ensure you're on the right page of answers, if a question has many answers over multiple pages. So we do ?show=xx where xx is the ID of the answer, then it calculates which page the answer is on.

If you never have more than one page of answers it won't make a difference.

However, all question pages should have the "canonical" URL set in <link rel="canonical" ...> so there should not be any problem in Google.

Comments

Thanks Scott