How to deindex an URL with specific parameter?

How to deindex an URL with specific parameter? - .htaccess files are extremely useful in many cases for users who either do not have root permissions or for users who simply aren't comfortable in making changes in their web server's configuration file. Trying to debug .htaccess not working isn't always the easiest thing to do, however, hopefully by checking the discuss below mentioned about seo, htaccess, search-engine-indexing, canonical-url, .htaccess common problems as well as the troubleshooting tips, you'll have a better grasp on what you may have to modify to get your .htaccess file running smoothly.Problem :

While I was doing an audit of my website SEO, I found a warning for a page that is most of the time blank.

Basically, this page serves for storing articles for visitors who would like to read their favorite selections later.

This is what the link looks like: https://example.com/?read-it-later

The problem with this is that the URL is the same as the homepage and as you can see it has next to it the parameter "read-it-later".

So I want to be very careful on how to prevent this URL from being indexed by google without compromising the indexing of the homepage.

Do you have any suggestions on the best approach through .htaccess or WordPress?

Solution :

As the content of the page is user-specific, it would likely be always blank for spiders (which probably won't trigger the conditions required to have anything other than the blank version of the page).

Ergo, you're probably better blocking spiders from accessing the page entirely. Just add the following to your robots.txt file.

Disallow: /?read-it-later

Alternatively, you could change the "blank" version of the page to make it entirely clear what the purpose of the page is, so if someone sees that page in their search results, they know what the page is for and therefore understand that your website offers a "read it later" functionality.

Additionally, if you would like to do some further testing, give the htaccess tester tool a try. It allows you to specify a certain URL as well as the rules you would like to include and then shows which rules were tested, which ones met the criteria, and which ones were executed.