Using 301s to redirect (& eliminate) mirror landing pages

What happens to the referrer urls?

[Robert Charlton]

I'm beginning to do onsite optimization on a site that up till now has only used PPC. Before the site owner began to use referrer urls, he used multiple landing pages... probably at least a dozen of them.

I see the landing pages as a source of problems. They're all mirror pages. Most of them are also "orphan" pages. From the SEO point of view, I'd like to get rid of them, but I don't want to disrupt the PPC operations, which involve a great many terms on multiple PPC services.

To preserve bookmarks and existing links to the site, as well as the PPC clickthroughs, I was thinking of using 301s to redirect these page requests to the index page of the site, but I'm wondering what would happen to referrer string information if we did this.

Current information on the stats pages for one of these strings reads something like....

/landingpage.html/?GTSE=GOTO&GTKW=keyword1+keyword2

If the pages were all redirected to, say, index.html, would the referrer information for the page above survive the redirect as follows?....

/index.html/?GTSE=GOTO&GTKW=keyword1+keyword2

Ultimately, the site owner will try to go back and change the referrer urls, but he tells me that's not possible in a short time-frame, and he doesn't want to lose any traffic.

Another option would be to change the content of the landing pages so they don't duplicate the main site pages... but I feel this would only be a partial solution.

[littleman]

If you do a 301 redirect the vast majority of browsers will carry the query string over to the redirected url. You should be able to track that way without too much of a problem.

[Slade]

It has been my limited experience that Yes, the browsers copy over the referral string on a redirect.

However, you could still capture these all in your script before you do the redirect and write them out somewhere (database).

[Robert Charlton]

Thank you. Just what I was hoping to hear.

I assume that at some point after putting on the redirects, it would be a good idea to go back to the PPC providers and change the url info, so that eventually the redirects won't be necessary.

[Hannu]

You don't mention what software you use, but if it's WebTrends you'll have to filter out requests resulting in a 301, otherwise you get two referrals per request.