Tracking Referrals

What's the best way of redirecting referrals?

[jam13]

At the moment I'm handling inbound referrals using URLs like this:

[widgets.com...]

which I then 301 to the correct page:

[widgets.com...]

I started doing this because I wanted to track referrals without Google (and others) indexing my referral codes and distorting the numbers.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have worked as I can still find my referral URLs in the index, although they don't seem to have a title or description.

I guess Googlebot doesn't deal with 301s nicely, so is there are better way of doing this that stops the referral page getting indexed but still transfers the PR?

[larryn]

Why not just use the query fields on the ultimate destination? Something like www.mysite.com/redwidgets.html?ref=acme

Thats much simpler for both tracking and bots.

[jam13]

> Why not just use the query fields on the ultimate destination? Something like www.mysite.com/redwidgets.html?ref=acme

> Thats much simpler for both tracking and bots.

I agree that it's much simpler, and I have used this before. The problem I found was that Google (and others) will index these entry pages as www.mysite.com/redwidgets.html?ref=acme which means traffic from SERPs is incorrectly associated with that referrer.

The 301 redirect was supposed to eliminate that problem - the search engine should index the redirect target rather than the entry page.

[nalin]

Try waiting - generally it seems to take some months for G to associate the redireter and redirectee.

[larryn]

OK, second thought...

Use PHP to read in the original content at the 'redirected' site. I'm pretty sure the 'passthru' function would do just that.

[trackingroi]

What are you using to track referrals? Are you trying to block the search engines from crawling them thus inflating your stats, or are you trying to block the search engines so people don't find those pages through organic searches and distort your numbers?

In either case, can you put your landing pages in one directory and then put a robots.txt file in there and forbid crawling?

[jam13]

> What are you using to track referrals? Are you trying to block the search engines from crawling them thus inflating your stats, or are you trying to block the search engines so people don't find those pages through organic searches and distort your numbers?

I do _want_ search engines to follow referral links, but I don't want them to index a link like:

[mysite.com...]

because if that link is returned in the SERPs and the users follows it, I see it as a referral from acme which it is not.

By using a 301 redirect I can log the referrer id and display a clean url to the user (or spider).

> In either case, can you put your landing pages in one directory and then put a robots.txt file in there and forbid crawling?

Surely that would stop the spiders from reaching the target page, wouldn't it?

Maybe I am not explaining myself very well :(

This is the sequence:

acme.com -click-> mysite.com/referral.html?ref=acme&url=widgets -301-> mysite.com/widgets.html

I want the spiders to reach the widgets page and index it, but I don't want them to index the referral page.

At the moment the referral page _is_ being indexed, but without a title or description.

[roitracker]

How about adding <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> to your referral.html page's header?

[jam13]

> How about adding <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> to your referral.html page's header?

Would that work with a 301? I didn't think metatags (or any content) were read with this kind of redirect.

[roitracker]

I was thinking of an alternative method to 301 - you could use a javascript redirect that parses the query string & forwards the visitor instead.

[Receptional]

What Nalin says.

We have seen 301 redirects work very well with Google in the past - although I hadn't tried them with dynamic variables. I guess a 301 could well parse the variables through to the new location. I am not that techie to know for sure.

One way to achieve this, is to send them directly to the page you want them to go to and use a script to track the referring URL, rather than sending the variables. Then you have to associate the referring domain with the affiliate (if that is what ACME refers to). There is software to do this already if you don't want to build your own, but it isn't free.

Of course, if it IS an affiliate track, then the affiliates are going to know what you are trying to do if they link without sending their affcodes.

Dixon.