ECommerce Site, URL's, Canonical and Tracking Referral Traffic
-
I'm very, very new to eCommerce websites that employ many different URL's to track referral traffic. I have a client that has 18 different URL's that land on the Home Page in order to track traffic from different referral sources. For example:
http://erasedisease.com/?ref=abot - Tracks traffic from an affiliate source
http://erasedisease.com/?ref=FB01 - Tracks traffic from a FB Ad
http://erasedisease.com/?ref=sas&SSAID=289169 - Tracks more affiliate traffic
...and the list goes on and on.
My first question is do you think this could hinder our Google rankings? SEOMoz Crawl doesn't show any Duplicate Content Errors, so I guess that's good. I've just been reading a lot about Canonical Url's and eCommerce sites, but I'm not sure if this is a situation where I'd want to use some kind of canonical plugin for this Wordpress website or not.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!!
-
Thank you so much guys! This information is incredibly helpful, and easy to transfer over to the client being that it's coming from experts. Thanks again!
-
To answer your 1st question: Yes you are going to have duplicate content issues. SEOmoz won't catch everything especially if you don't put those URLs in a sitemap where they can access it.
Your client is doing it ALL WRONG!
Install Google Analytics. Use the Google Anaytics URL Builder : http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
Log in to GA and go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns.
I just created one for you: http://www.erasedisease.com/?utm_source=SEOmoz&utm_medium=QandA&utm_campaign=Francisco_Meza_affiliate . Click it and you'll see it populate in GA in a day or two. It'll make sense once you see it in action. Basically you are creating URLs to track campaigns from affiliates. Now you will NEVER have duplicate content issues.
-
You definitely need to use a canonical tag to handle tracking URLs. If you're on WordPress I highly recommend using Yoast's SEO Plugin - not only for canonicals, but everything.
You can also handle tracking URLs within Google Webmaster Tools.
-Dan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
SERP result (URL) doesn't change after a 301
A couple of months ago there was a result in Google for our branded search term which wasn't the 'official' URL, actually the result shown in the SERP was www.mycompany-ip.nl. We've applied a 301 redirect of this URL to the 'official' URL which is a subdomain: department.mycompany.nl. From Google the redirect is obviously working, but up until now, I don't see Google replacing the incorrect URL by the correct URL. I am wondering what to do to make the result correct. André
Technical SEO | | ConclusionDigital0 -
Link's that are an internal site search?
Hi hope your're all well. I sell Red, Blue, Green Widgets within each color I have many sub types, the subtypes change all the time,and a sub type has many variations in itself. I'd like to set up links that direct customers to popular searches of sub types say: widgets.com/red/blue-spots....search string... Will Google crawl these search links and see that there is good content behind it? How does Google handle links that are also a site search? Can it be bad and should I "no follow" them? Hope someone can give me some direction on these, many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Thea880 -
Why isn't my site not searchable from google?
I am having a hard time figuring out why is it that when I search for my website name, it didn't show up in google's search result? Here's a link to my site. I've been twiddling for days looking for answers in my google webmaster tools. Here's a link of the crawl stats from google webmaster tool. As you can see it is actually crawling some pages. However my looking at my indexed status, I am getting 0 as you can see here (http://cl.ly/image/3G1R1p0b3k1P). I've double checked for my robots.txt and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary there. I am not blocking anything. Any ideas why?
Technical SEO | | herlamba0 -
How to solve the meta : A description for this result is not available because this site's robots.txt. ?
Hi, I have many URL for commercialization that redirects 301 to an actual page of my companies' site. My URL provider say that the load for those request by bots are too much, they put robots text on the redirection server ! Strange or not? Now I have a this META description on all my URL captains that redirect 301 : A description for this result is not available because this site's robots.txt. If you have the perfect solutions could you share it with me ? Thank You.
Technical SEO | | Vale70 -
What's the correct SEO for a Gallery?
Hi there, I was wondering if anyone was an expert on galleries and using canonical URL's? URL: http://www.tecsew.com/gallery In short I'm doing SEO for a site and it has a large gallery (3000+ images) where each specific image has it's own page and each category (there's 200+) also has its own page. Now, what I'm thinking is that this should be reduced and asking Google to index/rank each page is wrong (I also think this because the quality of the pages are relatively low i.e little text & content etc) Therefore, what should be suggested/done to the gallery? Should just the main gallery categories get indexed (i.e http://www.tecsew.com/3d-cad-showcase)? Or should I continue to allow Google to trawl through all of it? Or should canonical URL's be used? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Best Wishes, Charlie S
Technical SEO | | media.street0 -
My site was hammered by this last update -- I'm freaking out -- what now
I looked at my seomoz report yesterday, almost all my money keywords went to hell. When I was looking at the graph for one of my keywords it looked so depressing I don't think I can look at it again. The funny thing is that my competitors have bunch of low quality links on unrelated websites and they haven't been touched. How to approach this problem, I'm scared to do anything at this point.
Technical SEO | | Tolod0 -
Canonical URLs and screen scraping
So a little question here. I was looking into a module to help implement canonical URLs on a certain CMS and I came a cross a snarky comment about relative vs. absolute URLs being used. This person was insistent that relative URLs are fine and absolute URLs are only for people who don't know what they are doing. My question is, if using relative URLs, doesn't it make it easier to have your content scraped? After all, if you do get your content scraped at least it would point back to your site if using absolute URLs, right? Am I missing something or is my thinking OK on this? Any feedback is much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | friendlymachine0