Affiliate Link is Trumping Homepage - URL parameter handling?
-
An odd and slightly scary thing happened today: we saw an affiliate string version of our homepage ranking number one for our brand, along with the normal full set of site-links.
We have done the following:
1. Added this to our robots.txt :
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?2. Reinserted a canonical on the homepage (we had removed this when we implemented hreflang as had read the two interfered with each other. We haven't had canonical for a long time now without issue. Is this anything to do with the algo update perhaps?!
The third thing we're reviewing I'm slightly confused about: URL Parameter Handling in GWT. As advised - with regard to affiliate strings - to the question: "Does this parameter change page content seen by the user?" We have NO selected, which means they should be crawling one representative URL. But isn't it the case that we don't want them crawling or indexing ANY affiliate URLs? You can specify Googlebot to not crawl any of particular string, but only if you select: "Yes. The parameter changes the page content." Should they know an affiliate URL from the original and not index them? I read a quote from Matt Cutts which suggested this (along with putting a "nofollow" tag in affiliate links just in case)
Any advice in this area would be appreciated. Thanks.
-
I'm glad to hear you've been sorted out Lawrence Neal. I find it interesting the the other Lawrence saw something similar, and I'll ask around to see if it was a glitch that other people have noticed too.
For anyone reading this wondering what Mr. Neal was referring to in regard to rel canonical / href lang conflict, there's a good writeup of it over at Dejanseo.com and Gianluca Fiorelli mentions it in his comment on Dr. Pete's Rel Canonical uber post here on Moz.
-
Luckily it's disappeared today, which leads me to believe it was a Google-side algo error that was swiftly corrected (nothing we have done will have reflected in the serp so quickly, I doubt)
-
Lets say your site is using php?
Your system no doubt picks up the parameter with a php get and stores it as a session variable.
That is likely all that would need to be done before the page is 301 redirected.
Best thing to do is create a test page with the cod mentioned above on your site and try it
have the page redirect to the homepage and see if that affiliate code is stored.
-
I don't know if this has anything to do with the algo update, but at least your not the only one. I saw a competitor ranking with a second version of their homepage. The second version had utm parameters behind them.
Luckily the page with the utm parameters disappeared from the serps this morning. He was actually ranking first with the normal version and second with the version with the url parameters. This was on some pretty competitive keywords and lasted almost three days.
-
Thanks for your reply, Gary. I'm not entirely sure how our (far reaching and lucrative) affiliate tracking/logging works, but I would have thought 301ing all the links to the original page would sabotage it, no?!
The canonical will certainly work but we've only reinstated it on the homepage as we have 6 other sites that have hreflang alternates in place and the canonical seems to interfere with their function.
-
hmmm.. seems like Google is getting some strong linking signals that this is the popular page to arrive at.
The canonical tag on the homepage is the right way to go.
You could 301 redirect any customer that lands on you with an affiliate code in the url? This would be a very simple bit of code you could even put it in an an include at the top of each page. This way those pages never even exist and you get all the link juice.
One other thing might be to put a noindex on any page that has an affiliate parameter. But you would lose the link juice.
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
-
Which URL structure is better?
Quick question - Have a real estate site focused on "apartments", but apartments in not part of my company name. That being said, should which of the following URL structures should I use? http://website.com/city/neighborhood/property-name OR http://website.com/city-apartments/neighborhood/property-name
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0 -
Keywords, when are you overdoing it in the URL?
Hi guys, I'm auditing a site covering compensation for cancer. Keywords could include: Undiagnosed cancer 20 cancer compensation 10 undiagnosed cancer symptoms 10 cancer misdiagnosis claims 20 cancer claims 10 misdiagnosis of cancer 50 cancer misdiagnosis 70 So, when structuring the URL for the category, this was previously selected: www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-misdiagnosis Although sub-pages appear like this: www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-misdiagnosis/breast-cancer-misdiagnosis-claim/ 'Cancer misdiagnosis' as a keyword attracts the most traffic, but if we're using it on sub-pages - is there a need to include it twice on all sub-page URLs? With that in mind, would it be better to follow the following format? www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-compensation www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-compensation/breast-cancer-misdiagnosis-claim/ Or is there a better way to structure this? Thanks in advance guys!
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Do I need a link to my sitemap?
I have a very large sitemap. I submit it to both Google and Bing, but do I need a link to it? If someone went there it would probably lock their browser. Is there any danger of not having a link if I submit it to Google and Bing?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Changed URL of all web pages to a new updated one - Keywords still pick the old URL
A month ago we updated our website and with that we created new URLs for each page. Under "On-Page", the keywords we put to check ranking on are still giving information on the old urls of our websites. Slowly, some new URLs are popping up. I'm wondering if there's a way I can manually make the keywords feedback information from the new urls.
Technical SEO | | Champions0 -
Cross links between sites
hi, We have several ecommerce sites and we cross linked 3 of them by mistake. We realize that the sites were linked through WMT, We have shut down 2 of the sites about 2 months ago, but WMT still shows the links coming from those 2 sites. how do we make sure that google will see the sites are shut down. Is there a better of way resolving this issue. We are no longer using those sites, so do not need them to be active. whats the best solution to show google that the links are no longer there. Crawler shows that it was able to crawl the site 45 days after it is shut down. thanks nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
To get homepage to rank highly for a given term, do you only add the term(and variations) to the homepage?
If adding the term on all pages then won't the pages start competing with each other in the SERP? I'm building a site for a client who wants to rank highly for 'Southern California general contractors' and its not clear to me whether to fit these keywords (and variations) only into the homepage or if I should try to fit them into all pages.
Technical SEO | | kennysmith0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Why would a link shown on OSE appear differently than the page containing the link?
I recently traded links with a site that I will call www.example.com When I used open site explorer to check the link it came back with a different page authority as www.example.com/index.htm yet the link does appear on the www.example.com page. Why would this be?
Technical SEO | | casper4340