Backlinks to unique login pages
-
Hi There,
This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help!
The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform.
For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with.
Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields.
So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this?
Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL?
Thanks in advance!
Henry
-
Cheers Bryce!
-
I don't think that should be an issue. The only time it would really be a problem is if you were doing "sniffing" for google bot and then displaying something different all-together.
The canonical tag isn't a bad idea either.
-
Thanks for that tip mate.
If all the customers were to link oursitesname.com/login. Would Google be suspicious if we were showing different content (branded login pages with text) to different referrers? I mean before they are logged in.
-
You have a measure of control over how Google treats parameters.
Log into Google Webmaster Tools > Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling tab. You can then add or modify any parameter and tell Google how they should react (i.e. ignore, dont ignore, let Google decide, or use a specific value).
Bing has a similar process.
-
Hi Ryan,
This is a very valid point and would be easy to do if the referrer was always coming directly from the customer site. The issue is that sometimes the customers (which are libraries) send their traffic over a 3<sup>rd</sup> party referrer (so the user can input a library card number) and some libraries use the same 3<sup>rd</sup> party referrer which makes things messy. This is the case about 40% of the time.
Any suggestions?
On a side note… How does Google treat the ? parameter in URLs (e.g. www.oursitesname.com/?customer-indentifier). Do these types of links carry the same link power as without the parameter?
Thanks for your help mate!
Henry
-
Hi Henry.
My primary question to you is regarding the approach you are taking. Why create a unique page for each customer?
It is a common practice among websites to offer login screens for users, and to customize pages based on cookies or login information. This can be accomplished without providing new pages on your site with unique URLs, but rather by allowing users to customize their page.
When I open my browser and go to Google.com, I am automatically logged in and I see my current background image of a lion. The page URL is shown as google.com and it is customized for me. This example is rather simple, but you can display current information relevant to your customer in the same manner.
I would suggest speaking to your website developer about making your site more dynamic in this regard. You will receive not only SEO benefits, but your site should become easier to maintain as well. If you do take this approach, be sure to work with your customers to update their current links, and to properly 301 your pages.
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
-
Why is my inner pages ranking higher than main page?
Hi everyone, for some reason lately i have discovered that Google is ranking my inner pages higher than the main subfolder page. www.domain.com/subfolder --> Target page to be ranked
Technical SEO | | davidboh
www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus ---> page that is currently ranking Also in the SERP most of the time, it is showing both links in this manner. www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus
-----------www.domain.com/subfolder Thanks in advance.1 -
How to remove spammy backlink from my webpage?
Hi Professionals, Someone create spammy backlinks in my website. How to remove spammy backlinks from my community "Sewways" company website? Please guide me to solve my this problem, because my website is D-Rank according to that backlinks. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Smartlanjabdul0 -
Unique Contextual Content
Let's say you have a page on your website which displays the current discounts available for iPhones. The page is a list of deals with buttons to reveal a promo code. Would adding contextual content to these pages improve rankings? If the main keywords are already on the page, such as "Save 20% on iPhone 5 with this great iPhone coupon code" where iPhone coupon code is the target keyword. Does it still make sense to put 500+ words of contextual content on that page, even when the content isn't really something the viewer cares about? I've noticed websites doing this, and ranking well. I wanted to know if this is a significant ranking factor or just a coincidence.
Technical SEO | | poke10 -
Mobile site backlinks?
Hello, Our mobile site redirects to desktop in a desktop browser and vice versa; however, they are different sites. This said, shouldn't the backlinks for our mobile site be the same as for our desktop site since one redirects to the other. We show no backlinks in my analysis? Any help or insight would be extremely appreciated! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1 -
Low page impressions
Hey there MOZ Geniuses; While checking my webmaster data I noticed that almost all my Google impressions are generated by the home page, most other content pages are showing virtually no impression data <50 (the home page is showing around 1500 - a couple of the pages are in the 150-200 range). the site has been up for about 8 months now. Traffic on average is about 500 visitors, but I'm seeing very little entry other then the home page. Checking the number Sitemap section 27 of 30 are index Webmaster tools are not reporting errors Webmaster keyword impressions are also extremely low 164 keywords with the highest impression count of 79 and dropping from there. MOZ is show very few minor issues although it says that it crawled 10k pages? -- we only have 30 or so. The answer seems obvious, Google is not showing my content ... the question is why and what steps can I take to analyze this? Could there be a possibility of some type of penalty? I welcome all your suggestions: The site is www.calibersi.com
Technical SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
What to do with "show all" page
Hello, What should I do with the following situation: In e-commerce shop I have an option to "show all products" (list all products in one page) - do I need to put canonnical or 301 redirect to somewhere or should I leave as normal page - I think google consider this is as duplicate since everything is the same (only number of products is different) ? Regards, Nenad
Technical SEO | | Uniline0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
How can I prevent duplicate content between www.page.com/ and www.page.com
SEOMoz's recent crawl showed me that I had an error for duplicate content and duplicate page titles. This is a problem because it found the same page twice because of a '/' on the end of one url. e.g. www.page.com/ vs. www.page.com My question is do I need to be concerned about this. And is there anything I should put in my htaccess file to prevent this happening. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onlineexpression
Karl0