In some cases, URLs with the parameter ?srsltid show up within the ranking URLs on SISTRIX. This can lead to multiple variants of the same URL being among the data recorded by SISTRIX.
This parameter was actually shown in the organic search results and was added with the Google Merchant Center of the URL. Google has this to say:
The srsltid parameter is appended to links generated by Google Merchant Center in organic shopping results (e.g., www.example.com?srsltid=123xyz).
Google Analytics Help
To address the speculation of the parameter being a potential error on Google, John Müller writes the following:
I followed up on this with the team, and here’s roughly what’s happening.
John Müller’s reaction on LinkedIn
These URL parameters are added for Merchant Center “auto-tagging” (there’s more about it at https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/15191080 ), when a site-owner has activated that feature. They’re used for conversion tracking for merchants. We plan to update the help page as appropriate once this rolls out more.
They’re added in search directly, with unique IDs using the “srsltid” parameter that you mentioned. The URLs are not indexed or crawled like that. It’s not a new setup, we’ve used this for quite some time for example in the shopping tab. We’ve now expanded it to traditional search results.
This doesn’t affect crawling, indexing, or ranking – it’s basically just for analytics for merchants. While not necessary, you can use the link rel=canonical element pointing at the preferred URL for indexing as you normally would. If you don’t want it, you can just turn off the setting (though it seems useful to me!). In Search Console, you mostly see the old usage of the parameter, we try to filter it out for the normal search results.
According to John Müller, adding the parameter is not a bug but instead due to the auto-tagging in the Google Merchant Center. The auto-tagging can be used to track how well the user converts after reaching the page from the organic results. A tutorial on how to turn the conversion tracking on or off can be found in the Google Merchant Help Center.
To prevent making the analysis of the URLs unnecessarily difficult for SISTRIX users, we filter the parameters srsltid and gclid out of the ranking data.
