Forum Moderators: DixonJones
The issue has been brought up a little in these forums [google.com], but I am thinking that third party cookies are going to become increasingly worrysome soon. This is going to cause problems for all sorts of people - affiliate programs being one - but tracking being another.
I hit the problem when we tried to track conversions on a secure server URL using a third party tracking system as back around 2004. Even though they supplied code for secure pages, an IE security update started leaving warning mnessages all over the user experience. We have to change tracking systems.
If third party cookies start to become a problem for NON secure pages, then there are going to be a lot of tracking systems rushing to catch up.
Do you think third party cookies affect the engines' indexing of the site or the position where those pages appear within the engines?
One of my clients wants to use their adserver tracking tag to monitor the seo performance. However, I am worried that the effect of the third party cookie being dropped by the tag will have a negative impact on the performance of these pages within the listings.
I would feel more comfortable recommending a first party cookie solution to track this, what are your views?
If anyone else has any evidence that third party cookies have a negative impact on rankings, that IS significant. My inclination is to say bots frankly don't care about cookies full stop. I haven't tested this though.
I can say I have top spot rankings on sites that do currently have third party cookies if that is any help (but they are not adserver cookies)
