Elementor is creating duplicate URLs with a special parameter in the permalink (can this be avoided?)

Roger Marquez

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I am seeing more and more of this on the permalink when crawling/auditing websites built/customized using Elementor.

domain.com/blog-post/#

domain.com/service-page/#elementor-action:action=popup:open&settings=eyJpZCI6IjEwNzkiLCJ0b2dnbGUiOmZhbHNlfQ==

It´s a drag having search engine bots crawling these URLs and me having to remove them from multiple SEO repports.

Why is this the case? How to prevent this?
 
Yeah, elementor and those funky duplicate urls are a real headache sometimes, especially when you're dealing with seo stuff. Those URLs are basically used by Elementor for things like opening popups or triggering other dynamic actions on the page. They’re not actual pages, but bots sometimes crawl them anyway, which can mess with your SEO reports.

Elementor adds these parameters to handle interactive features like popups, animations, or other dynamic content. The # part (hash fragment) is supposed to be client-side only, meaning it shouldn’t affect the server or be indexed by search engines. But, well, bots don’t always play by the rules.

How to prevent it?

Here are a few ways to stop these urls from cluttering your seo reports:

Use data-noindex for Elementor Popups
If you’re using Elementor Pro, you can add data-noindex="true" to your popups. This tells search engines not to index those links. Just go to your popup settings and add this attribute.

Block Crawling in robots.txt
You can disallow crawling of urls containing #elementor-action in your robots.txt file. Add something like this:

Disallow: /*#elementor-action

This won’t stop the urls from being generated, but it’ll keep bots from crawling them.

Canonical Tags
Make sure your canonical tags are set up correctly. This helps search engines understand which version of the URL is the "main" one. Elementor usually handles this well, but double-check your settings.

Use a Plugin
Plugins like Rank Math or Yoast seo can help you manage duplicate content and canonical urls . They might not specifically target these Elementor URLs, but they’ll help clean up your overall SEO.

JavaScript Handling
If you’re comfortable with code, you can use Javascript to prevent these links from being followed by bots. For example, you can modify the links to include rel="nofollow" dynamically.

Hope this helps!
 
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