AdSense not showing ads because links from Facebook add a query parameter

Question

If I post a profile of a user from my website on Facebook, Facebook always adds a query parameter.

That is OK, but AdSense thinks every new query parameter is a new page and needs to crawl it before it can show ads. It is really still the same site just with a different query parameter.

Answer 1

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/”>

Answer 2

Query parameters do make different URLs. When Facebook is adding parameters, it is creating new URLs. AdSense has no way of knowing whether or not the content is going to be different or not without crawling the URL.

To get around this problem, you can redirect to remove the unwanted query parameters. See this question on StackOverflow: .htaccess - Remove one query parameter from URL.

When you redirect visitors to your canonical URL without the query paramater, the ads will get served from that canonical URL and AdSense will be able to show the ads without extra crawling.