SEO friendly navigation tracking

Workarounds for tracking issue on multiple page versions

[foolsgold]

A site we work for has customised tracking on their navigation which is creating multiple versions of the page, each with its own page rank and cached version. The tracking cannot be removed. Doh!

This is having a negative impact on their natural rankings so we are looking to resolve the issue.

Possible solutions we have thought of are adding a 'nofollow' tag to every link with the tracking, leaving only the 1 non-tracked link on any page going to any other page (as there always seems to be one non-tracked version in every set). This way - since the nav tracking is all hard-coded anyway - it could tell the SE's to only ever look at the untracked-URL of each page.

Or we could 301 each nav-tracked page pointing to the untracked version, so that the tracking system still get it's data but then immediately redirects the user (and the SE's) to the right version.

If there is anybody with experience of either solution, or indeed a further solution we haven't thought of?

[Receptional]

Whoa... don't you always hate it when you have to do loads of work to fix someone else's problem? I hope you get paid for it.

A 301 solution would probably work better, as you lose link equity with nofollow tags, but simply transfer link equity with 301s (That's the theory, anyway).

The problem may arise in trying to get a 301 message AFTER the tracking, since you may need to have a 200 response to be able to get the tracking code to run in the first place. I'm no programmer, though.

Best,

Dixon.

[foolsgold]

Receptional

Yes, we preferred the 301 option but good point about trying to get a 301 message AFTER the tracking code.

Rest assured we are getting paid, and we will find an answer!

[forexisstock]

I learning for SEO. New babies. Please suggest to me.
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[edited by: Receptional at 12:58 pm (utc) on July 9, 2007]
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