Query string contains more than three parameters

This means that the URL in question contains a query string with more than 3 parameters.

Why is this important?

In a URL, the query starts with a question mark, with multiple query parameters separated by ampersands ("&").

For example, this URL has 2 parameters: https://example.com/page?parameter1=x&parameter2=y

URLs with more than 3 parameters could be considered highly dynamic, for example, faceted search URLs that include multiple filters and sorts. If these were found by the Sitebulb crawler, they may also be accessible to search engines, and could lead to issues with crawl budget or duplicate content.

What does the Hint check?

This Hint will trigger for any internal URL which contains a question mark in the query string, and therefore multiple question marks in the URL.

Examples that trigger this Hint

The Hint would trigger for any URL with four or more query parameters, for example:

http://example.com/page?a=1&b=2&c=3&d=4

Why is this Hint marked 'Insight'?

This Hint is an 'Insight', which means there isn't necessarily any action that needs to be taken - the Hint is intended to alert your attention to something, rather than flagging up an issue that needs fixing.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with URLs that have lots of parameters, and search engines may be handling them without issue.

However, this is worth looking into further if there are a very high number of URLs with more than 3 parameters (in comparison with the rest of the site) or if you know that search engines are having problems crawling all the URLs on the website.

If you deem this to be an issue worth fixing, you would either need to reduce the number of parameters within URLs, or find other solutions for stopping search engine crawlers wasting time on highly dynamic URLs (e.g. configure parameters in Google Search Console).

Further Reading

• Categorize parameters with the URL Parameters tool