I am using a CMS which offers a wide range of options which lead to many additional special pages mainly in a way duplicating the same content as the original article. These generated pages are accessible via URL parameters and are automatically linked to from other pages by the CMS.My problem is that I want to get rid of these special pages because...in my eyes they contain hardly any worth for my usersthey generate duplicated contentsearch engine waste their time crawling all these generated pagesUnfortunately I am not able to deny the CMS generating those special pages and even if I could many of this unwanted URL parameters are already known to the search engines.So I plan to use a .htaccess 301 redirect to remove each URL parameter leading to such special pages. So for example:article.php?userid=1&highlight=red&background=blue would be 301'ed to article.php?userid=1&highlight=redand this in the same call to the final call of article.php?userid=1So from an SEO perspective, I will have dozens of different links with parameters set in my very own website which actually via 301 all lead to the same webpage. My hope is that search engines would not consider them as duplicates and after a while would stop crawling them (as I also but with no effect told them in search console and the like).For the UX I only see the drawback that those redirected links will not have the promised effect, but I think I could neglect that as those links are very rarely used.My question is what harm this may do concerning UX and SEO when I (multiple) 301 redirect pages my website is actually linking to? Maybe someone even has a better way to handle this situation?
Is it OK for SEO and user experience to 301 redirect self-generated param URLs?
seo;web crawlers;duplicate content;parameters