Will removing unused query string parameters negatively affect SEO?

Posted by trm on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by trm
Published on 2014-08-20T20:12:06Z Indexed on 2014/08/20 22:34 UTC
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seo

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query-string

Will changing links to remove query string parameters that are no longer used have any negative impact on search engine rankings?

Say I have a page about.php on my site, and all of my links to this page are of the form

http://www.example.com/about.php?foo=bar

and I've made some changes to the script such that the parameter foo is no longer used.

I would like to remove the unused parameter from the links so the URL will look cleaner, but I am concerned that this could cause problems with SEO.

Is it safe to remove ?foo=bar from my links?

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