Tracking URLS and Redirects
-
We have a client with many archived newsletters links that contain tracking code at the end of the URL. These old URLs are pointing to pages that don't exist anymore. Is there a way to set up permanent redirects for these old URLs with tracking code? We have tried and it doesn't seem to work.
Thank you!
-
I am confused about the tracking code as well. If the tracking code are parameters appended to the url, it shouldnt have anything to do with a valid url. Maybe you should carify with an example:
- Scenario #1 - www.site.com/email is a valid url, and the link from the newsletter is www.site.com/email?utm_source=newsletter, the link should still work. The tracking parameters have nothing to do with a page not working. If the page still exists without the tracking parameters in the url, then you have an IIS/IT issue. I have seen this one time where dynamic parameters (anything after a question mark) did cause issues on the server and it returned a 404 everytime you hit a page and put in parameters into the url string. Its a systematic fix in the server settings and you would need to look to your host/IT to fix the issue and allow dynamic parameters in url strings.
- Scenario #2 - www.site.com/email is no longer a vaild page, because it was set up a long time ago for the email campaign, then page is no longer there. In this case, no matter what the link is (tracking or no tracking), you will need to do a 301 redirect on the root url www.site.com/email and all variation of that url (including tracking urls) will automatically redirect to a specified page.
If the 301 redirecting is not working, then you have set it up wrong. It would be worth your time to manually go through and redirect each url to a proper spot, but worst case scenario is to do what Moosa Hemani pointed out and do a great 404 page.
-
Well there when there is a will there is a way. I believe if you combine these two technologies you will be able to do this very easily. I want to say however to take 404 and have it redirected. the rule is you should always redirect 404's to good pages 200s with a permanent 301 redirect however redirect should be always 301 redirects and then they are almost impossible to track. So the key to this will be catching it right in the redirection of the person trying to access the dead link a.k.a. 404.
Never say never. So I suggest you take the technology found with this system I "totally awesome"
Look at http://support.awe.sm/
If I simply type in "track 301 redirects" you can see that it has the ability to do this. awe.sm also allows you to create its own links. It's normally designed to use custom domains meaning shorter domains however you can use your own primary full domain with no problems whatsoever.
http://support.awe.sm/customer/portal/articles/search?q=Track+301+redirects
with
https://www.kissmetrics.com/ 14 day free try then $150 a month
https://mixpanel.com/ has a free tier and will allow you more than enough to track thousands of clicks for a month at no cost. However I must warn you I'm not as familiar with this technology I do know it is very similar to what is available with kiss metrics
My first step would be to speak to support kiss metrics as well as awesome and get an idea of what they can help you with. Because totally awesome and mixed panel support as far as I know to this day do not work together
If you do not want to pay that money which I understand do not possibly want to pay that. There is a alternative that is very similar to kiss metrics called mixpanel and I am not as familiar with it however I do know that it completes a lot of the same tasks and you get my bit of you page views for free as there is a free tear that allows you use of everything that has. So if you need something that's going to last longer this may be the way you want to go depending on budget and other things
I say this because kiss-metrics is a fantastic way of tracking in addition to that they were with awesome and their support departments will help you along the way.
I hope this is better help you and this is a step in the right direction.
I truly believe that that the key is in creating custom links using awesome and then tracking them with that. Because it's all designed around using 301 redirects
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Should not be too hard, there are options for mass 301ing.
What is going wrong? It is not very clear for me why 301 is not working
-
I don’t think this seems to be an option but what you can do is to design a good looking 404 page and then if the page does not exist redirect them to 404 pages! This way you don’t have to set redirect 1 by 1...
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
-
301 redirecting to anchor points
A client has just given me a list of redirect URLs as requested of them. However, they're wanting to redirect a bunch of pages to various anchor points within the same page. For example: /pages/about might redirect to: /pages/our-story#our-mission And: /pages/history might redirect to: /pages/our-story#history Is there any problem with this? I've never seen or been asked to redirect like this before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Website Redirection Issue
Hi All, Like to know is there any better way to do 301 redirection. My Client whose website name is Online Plants created with OpenCart. Over the period of time he added nearly 10,000's of products and now he is cleaning them ( by grouping similar attribute under one products) which is right way to do. For example , Product A with different size ( X,XL,XXL ) previously had 3 product entry ( A - X, A - XL, A - XXL ) , now he is moving all of them under one. So while moving he is deleting the other two entry. Now whats the best way to inform google . Putting a manual 301 redirection for each and every product is impossible as there are more products. Whats the best way to go ahead on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Verve-Innovation1 -
Microsite Subfolder URL vs Redirected TLD for best SEO
We have a healthcare microsite that is in a subfolder off a hospital site.They wanted to keep their TLD and redirect from the subfolder URL. Even with good on-page SEO, link building, etc., they're not organically ranking as well as we think they should be. ie. They have http://our-business-name.com vs. http://hospital.org/our-business-name/ For best SEO value, are they better off having only their homepage as TLD and not redirect any interior pages but display as subfolder URL? ie. Keep homepage as http://our-business-name.com but use hospital urls for interior pages http://hospital.org/our-business-name/about/ Or is there some better way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IT-dmd0 -
Danger in using utm_source and utm_medium to track tens of thousands of cross domain redirects
We just merged with another company and are redirecting their domains (competitive/similar content) to our own. We'll have several domains, redirecting (301) several hundred thousand URL's to our domain (not all the same page, very unique mappings). Will adding utm_source, et al parameters to the URL's have a negative impact on how google transfers value to the pages based on the redirect authority passed? Any points of view? We have a self referencing canonical, but given that we have 90 million pages on the current domain (and climbing), seems like cleanest approach would be to not use redirects. Thanks, Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jrjames830 -
How to conduct catch 301 redirects & have the separate 301 redirects for the key pages
Hi, We've currently done a site migration mapping and 301 redirecting only the sites key pages. However two GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is picking a massive amount of 404 areas and there has been some drop in rankings. I want to mitigate the site from further decline, and hence thought about doing a catch 301 - that is 301 redirecting the remaining pages found on the old site back to the home page, with the future aim of going through each URL one by one to redirect them to the page which is most relevant. Two questions, (1) can I do a catch 301 and if so what is the process and requirements that I have to give to the developer? (2) How do you reduce the number of increasing 404 errors from a site, despite doing 301 redirects and updating links on external linking sites. Note: The server is apache and the site is hosted on Wordpress platform. Regards, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian0 -
301 redirect
Hi there, I have some good links pointing to one of my web pages at the moment, however we are just about to launch a new design with new URL structure and I am clear that I need to do a 301 redirect on the URL to the new URL. However, do I keep the old URL live forever? or can I remove it after a while? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
What Should I Do With My URL Names?
I release property on my blog each week, and it has come to the point we will get property in the same area as we have had in the past. So, I name my URL /blah-blah-blah-[area of property]/ for the first property in that area right. Now I get a different property in that same area and the URL will have to be named /blah-blah-blah-[area of property]-2/. Now I'm not sure if this is a major issue or not, but I'm sure there must be a better way than this, and I don't really want to take down our past properties - unless you can give me good reason too, of course? So before I start getting URLs like this: /blah-blah-blah-[area of property]-2334343534654/ (well, ok, maybe not that bad! But you get my point) I wanted to see what everyones opinion on it is 🙂 Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonathanRolande0 -
Effect of URL change on Website
Hello we are developers and we have just created a new webpage for a client of us. The problem is that we can not replace the old one by the new one, cause our client has developed over 15 satellite pages that calls directly to the code of the old page. If we completly remove the old page we will make those 15 pages go down. Those pages are working over domains specially register for SEO reasons. For example Main page is www.euroair.es Satellite page is www.aireacondicionadodaikin.com Satellite page has pretty good ranking for search term "aire acondicionado daikin" As I told you, we have a new page but we can not make the page work over root domain. So we thought we could make it work over www.euroair.es/es, and make a redirection 301 of homepage and another important inner pages. We chose "/es" folder because it seems like a language folder, but we are not very sure of the effects of pages working on that folder instead of working on root directory. What do you think? Is this matter important or doesn't? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite.com0