justdave
msg:411151 | 10:50 pm on Mar 30, 2005 (gmt 0) |
Can't say I know for sure, but I don't think it should. Obviously it won't add link popularity value for the purchased links, but I assume by your scenario that you are more interested in actual traffic anyway. It sounds like a good way to make sure you get a good ROI on your purchased links.
|
killroy
msg:411152 | 11:32 pm on Mar 30, 2005 (gmt 0) |
A: A 301 redirect should ensure that any linking benefits carries through to the destination page, and
B: In this scenario you should be perfectly well served by tracking the referer and not need any code at all. SN
|
nuevojefe
msg:411153 | 7:07 am on Mar 31, 2005 (gmt 0) |
What specific statistics are you hoping to track? If you're getting nitty gritty, sure you may want to do something like this. If you only want to know how many hits a link is sending you may not need to take it that far. Good stats (in-house progs or otherwise) can do quite a bit even without click-tracking schemes. I'd avoid this if at all possible because I'd want the link popularity.
|
jaffstar
msg:411154 | 3:37 pm on Mar 31, 2005 (gmt 0) |
| B: In this scenario you should be perfectly well served by tracking the referer and not need any code at all. |
|
Exactly :) I don't trust 301 redirects. Who around here has successfully obtained PR with the use of a 301?
|
Michael Weir
msg:411155 | 5:11 pm on Mar 31, 2005 (gmt 0) |
I'm not talking about a 301 redirect. There is just some tracking code in the link so that we can track how many clicks the link is getting. The user is redirected through a third party tracking system (which drops a cookie or whatever into our in-house tracking software db) to the links destination. As for link popularity vs. monitoring clicks - we wish for both. Will this kind of redirect negatively effect our site, and/or prevent PR from transfering? Thanks for the responses thus far, it is greatly appreciated! - keep em' coming. :)
|
justdave
msg:411156 | 5:44 pm on Mar 31, 2005 (gmt 0) |
If the link goes through a third party tracking system before actually going to the site, I don't see how the PR would be able to be passed to the site.
|
Michael Weir
msg:411157 | 11:50 pm on Mar 31, 2005 (gmt 0) |
It's tough to say. I mean, it's still a link from point A to point B, it just takes a slight detour along the way.
|
peewhy
msg:411158 | 12:03 am on Apr 1, 2005 (gmt 0) |
It doesn't go from A to B, it goes from A to elswhere and somewhere, then anywhere ...before it arrives at the destination. No mileage there.
|
Michael Weir
msg:411159 | 5:15 pm on Apr 1, 2005 (gmt 0) |
Okay I'm not getting any definate answers here, so I guess we'll try it and see what happens. The best way to gain knowledge is to do it yourself, right?
|
limitup
msg:411160 | 1:35 am on Apr 2, 2005 (gmt 0) |
In order to do any real tracking you need to have the links go through your internal tracking system i.e. a script. When done with the processing the script should do a 301 redirect to the final destination. This *should* pass PR, especially since you are redirecting within the same domain. I mean just think about it. If you have a great page that tons of sites link to, and then you have to move the page for some reason and you do a 301 to the new URL, why would G "penalize" you by not passing PR to the new page? This goes against their goal of providing relevant results if they basically "forget" the value they've placed on a page just because it moved within the same domain. G specifically recommends using 301s where appropriate, and it just wouldn't be logical to penalize 301s within the same site, so I would have to assume it will pass PR. I'm doing this myself since it's the most logical way to handle the tracking issue, and I should know one way or another once the current dance is done.
|
Robert Charlton
msg:411161 | 5:36 am on Apr 4, 2005 (gmt 0) |
| I'm not talking about a 301 redirect. There is just some tracking code in the link so that we can track how many clicks the link is getting. |
|
I'm not a programmer, but isn't it possible simply to put an onclick javascript event in a straight html link? - The search engines wouldn't see the javascript... they'd just follow the link. - Users with js enabled would activate the onclick event and get counted. - Users without js enabled wouldn't get counted, but they'd be able to follow the link. So you'd have some margin of error, but one I'd think you could live with. I assume this could be set up on a purchased link to report to your database.
|
Michael Weir
msg:411162 | 5:59 pm on Apr 5, 2005 (gmt 0) |
limit up, yeah that does make perfect sense. I'm not really sure what the action on the tracking link is so when we get around to that it will take some experimenting I guess. RC - I'll have to try the OnClick method - I had not thought of that myself. :) I'm not sure how much you can do with a JS OnClick parameter - whether you can tell it to send a tracking cookie to our database, etc.
|
|
