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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
Htaccess or url rewrite module for Magento 301 redirects?
I need to do about 6000 redirects for a Magento site. The pages no longer exist. I have tried the URL rewrite module but it isn't working for me and I don't want to do 6000 redirects in the htaccess files. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
How much does URLs with CAPS and URLs with non-CAPS existing on an IIS site matter nowadays?
I work on a couple ecommerce sites that are on IIS. Both sites have return a 200 header status for the CAPS and non CAPS version of the URLs. While I suppose it would be ok if the canonicals pointed to the same version of the page, in some cases it doesn't (ie; /Home-Office canonicalizes to itself and /home-office canonicalizes to itself). I came across this article (http://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/case-sensitive-urls-and-seo-case-matters/) that is a few years old and I'm wondering how much of an issue it is and how I would determine if it is/isn't?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OfficeFurn0 -
Implementing Large-Scale Redirects
Hello All, I have a situation with my site where a vendor created a local directory of locations on a sub-domain of my site. This sub-domain has approximately 2000 pages. It is a PR3 and a good backlink profile (not many links. Mostly citations. Not spammed). It get decent traffic but 80% of the traffic is driven by ppc. We have created a new local section on the main page of our website and we are trying to weigh the benefit of redirecting all of those pages on the old sub-domain. We anticipate that this new section will begin to replace the old sub-domain in serps. Additionally, when our deal with the company that manages this sub-domain ends in three months, the pages will no longer exist. Is it worth redirecting the pages (you might need more information to give good insight into that)? Also, if we do implement approx. 2000 redirects, what effect will that have on the main site from an SEO perspective. Is it possible that Google might ignore this large scale redirect effort? Will the value also be limited by the fact the redirect might only be live for a month before the original pages are deleted? Any help/insight with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ResponseMine0 -
URL Redirect: http://www.example.net/ vs. http://www.example.net
I currently have a website set up so that http://www.example.net/ redirects to http://www.example.net but **http://www.example.net/ **has more links and a higher page authority. Should I switch the redirect around? Here's the Open Site Explorer metrics for both: http://www.example.net/ Domain Authority: 38/100 Page Authority: 48/100 Linking Root Domains: 112 Total Links: 235 http://www.example.net Domain Authority: 38/100 Page Authority: 45/100 Linking Root Domains: 18 Total Links: 39
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbrake0 -
Canonical OR redirect
Hi, i've a site about sport which cover matches. for each match i've a page. last week there was a match between: T1 v T2 so a page was created: www.domain.com/match/T1vT2 - Page1 this week T2 host T1, so there's a new page www.domain.com/match/T2vT1 - Page2 each page has a unique content with Authorship, but the URL, Title, Description, H1 look very similar cause the only difference is T2 word before T1. though Page2 is available for a few days, on site links & sitemap, for the search query "T2 T1 match" Page1 appears on the SERP (high location). of course i want Page2 to be on SERP for the above query cause it's the relevant match. i even don't see Page2 anywhere on the SERP and i think it wasn't indexed. Questions: 1. do you think google see both pages as duplicated though the content is different? 2. is there a difference when you search for T1 vs T2 OR T2 vs T1 ? 3. should i redirect 301 Page1 to Page2? consider that all content for Page1 and the Authorship G+ will be lost. 4. should i make rel=canonical on Page1 to Page2? 5. should i let google sort it out? i know it's a long one, thanks for your patience. Thanks, Assaf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stassaf0 -
Spaces in URL line
Hi Gurus, I recently made the mistake of putting a space into a URL line between two words that make up my primary key word. Think www.example.com/Jelly Donuts/mmmNice.php instead of www.example.com/JellyDonuts/mmmNice.php This mistake now needed fixing to www.example.com/Jelly Donuts/mmmNice.php to pass W3, but has been in place for a while but most articles/documents under 'Jelly Donuts' are not ranking well (which is probably the obvious outcome of the mistake). I am wondering whether the best solution from an SEO ranking viewpoint is to: 1. Change the article directory immediately to www.example.com/JellyDonuts/mmmNice.php and rel=canonical each article to the new correct URL. Take out the 'trash' using robots.txt or to 301 www.example.com/Jelly Donut to the www.example.com/JellyDonut directory? or perhaps something else? Thanks in advance for your help with this sticky (but tasty) conundrum, Brad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BM70 -
SEO Overly-Dynamic URL Website with thousands of URLs
Hello, I have a new client who has a Diablo 3 database. They have created a very interesting site in which every "build" is it's own URL. Every page is a list of weapons and gear for the gamer. The reader may love this but it's nightmare for SEO. I have pushed for a blog to help generate inbound links and traffic but overall I feel the main feature of their site is a headache to optimize. They have thousands of pages index in google but none are really their own page. There is no strong content, H-Tags, or any real substance at all. With a lack of definition for each page, Google see's this as a huge ball of mess, with duplicate Page Titles and too many onpage links. The first thing I did was tell them to add a canonical link which seemed to drop the errors down 12K leaving only 2400 left...which is a nice start, but the remaining errors is still a challenge. I'm thinking about seeing if I can either find a way to make each page it's own blurb, H Tag or simple have the Nav bar and all the links in the database Noindex. That way the site is left with only a handful of URLs + the Blog and Forum Thought?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikePatch0