Should I use NOINDEX, FOLLOW to solve link juice dilution for UTM link parameters?

Question

I'm reading that links with UTM tracking code are considered as separate links from Google's point of view and can be recognized as duplicated content.

(1) I know NOINDEX, FOLLOW can solve the duplicated content issue, but my concern is that will it cause the actual link (without UTM tracking parameters) to not being indexed by Google as well?

Here's my situation:

A Wordpress driven site, where posts are paginated.

eg.

http://example.org/post/1000
http://example.org/post/1000/2
http://example.org/post/1000/3

I'm already using rel="prev", rel="next", and rel="canonical" accordingly for the above URLs.

What I'm trying to do is to add UTM parameters to links (first page of the post) being shared to social media or mobile app.

eg.

http://example.org/post/1000?utm_source=example.org&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=app

(2) In this case, will Google treat the above URL separately and dilute the link juice?

Or will search engine ended up displaying the above URL instead of the original URL (without the UTM tracking parameters)?

My idea is to programmingly inject NOINDEX, FOLLOW meta tags to the UTM tracking URL when the matching Query String is presented.

I want to avoid the UTM tracking URL showing up in the search result and pass the social sharing link juice back to the original URL.

(3) In the end, my question is, what's the best practice and approach to tackle the situation above?

Thanks.

Answer 1

use something like this, for Apache, to set all urls with certain parameter to noindex:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^utm_source*)$
RewriteRule .* - [E=NOINDEX_HEADER:1] 
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, follow" env=NOINDEX_HEADER
</IfModule>

for nginx:

location ~*  {
if ($args != utm_source) {
add_header X-Robots-Tag noindex;
}
}

if NOINDEX for URL with UTM parameters will affect the original URL of its indexability

surely no.

Answer 2

I would say the best solution is use the canonical tag. Noindex and follow is a solution but you have to use noindex and follow tag on every page that is running with query string, so better to use a canonical tag.