Forum Moderators: phranque
Scenario #1:
I'm working on a system of tracking a few specific links on my site to see which ones are most effective. They're all pointing toward the same page. To do the tracking, I had intended to append a different query string to each link pointing at this page. I can then track which links are getting clicked most often.
The page the links are pointing toward will have the same content, regardless of where the visitor has come from.
Scenario #2:
I have another page that I intend to use mostly as a landing page for various ad campaigns. The links pointing to this page will also use different query strings, and the content of the page may differ significantly depending on what query string is being used. I expect to wind up with no fewer than 20-30 different query strings being used to access this page, and they'll all cause different content to be displayed.
The Question:
In both cases, my concern is how the search engines will view the pages in question. In the first instance, it would be nice if they saw the linked-to page as the same page regardless of the query string in the link they followed to the page. In the second instance, I can imagine potential spam penalties unless the SE's consider each query string to be an entirely separate page.
I've searched around but have yet to find any clarity on this issue. This thread [webmasterworld.com] does say that each query string counts as a separate page, which I like in the second scenario but not in the first. And yet, so many sites use different query strings for tracking purposes, that I can't imagine Google, MSN or Yahoo actually indexes them all individually unless there is a difference on the page.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Matthew
Scenario #1:I'm working on a system of tracking a few specific links on my site to see which ones are most effective. They're all pointing toward the same page. To do the tracking, I had intended to append a different query string to each link pointing at this page. I can then track which links are getting clicked most often.
The page the links are pointing toward will have the same content, regardless of where the visitor has come from.
There are a whole load of issues here.
Are the links on the same page? if not you could track a percentage of clicks simply by referer. If they are on the same page then you need to consider something else.
If you make the query strings complicated enough then most search engines will not try to index them. Think of user session ID's with various other variable attached to the end of the query string, they make sites difficult to index.
You could generate tracking strings like this:
example.htm?ID=df98g76df9hyg876sdfg978df6yg7896&FD=1462&TY=40238947&TRACK=1&NS=58453490
Where the only thing that you take notice of is TRACK, this can work for any HTML page as it will ignore the querystring and your logs can be analysed to gatther the stats.
Alternatively you could go the whole hog by putting a tracking script in place. There's plenty of such scripts around but again I would take care to make it look too complicated for the search engines to bother about. Just putting a script up with an URLENCODED URL and a tracking number will probably end up with the search engines spidering it (and even thinking you are up to no good).
We've not even started with the 'nofollow' possibilities.
Scenario #2:I have another page that I intend to use mostly as a landing page for various ad campaigns. The links pointing to this page will also use different query strings, and the content of the page may differ significantly depending on what query string is being used. I expect to wind up with no fewer than 20-30 different query strings being used to access this page, and they'll all cause different content to be displayed.
Advert landing pages should not be referenced from your main site (and they should ONLY be for landing, dual purpose is very bad), they are dynamic in nature and will differ depending on outside influences. Speaking as an AdWords advertiser with 30,000 ads pointing to one dynamic page I can report no problems having landing pages as 'orphans'. You could even go as far as denying them from being spidered.
The second scenario is much less of an issue than the first. Scenario 2 should not give rise to duplicate pages (assuming you show different content for each ad). Scenario 1 is the one I would worry about.
[edited by: tedster at 4:43 am (utc) on Jan. 3, 2006]
[edit reason] fix side-scroll [/edit]
For the first scenario, I understand what you mean about using complex query strings. Do I understand correctly that the SE's will still index the page, but will not index the query strings as separate pages? In that case, I should be okay. If the complex query string means the SE's will just ignore the links, then I'll have to come up with something else. Tracking the referer won't work since many pages have several links that I want to track separately.
Still on tracking, what if I take all links I want to track, and point them at the page I want them to wind up on, with even a simple query string. Then, (since the page is PHP anyway), the first thing on the page could be to log the query string, then use header(Location...) to give a 301 redirect to the same page with the query string stripped off. Is that a "sneaky redirect," or are there other issues with such an approach?
On the second scenario, the landing pages, I also know what you mean about not linking to the landing page from my main site. I've done things like this before and they definitely do need to be landing pages only, as you said. However, I'm not just going to be doing AdWords with this page. I'll be doing several marketing things with it, and I was hoping to pick up some PR and inbound link credit at the same time. But I question whether I'll get those benefits if each incoming link is indexed as a separate query string. Perhaps I should again try the 301 technique mentioned above?
As you can see, I'm branching out into something I know little about. Any and all advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks again,
Matthew
Do I understand correctly that the SE's will still index the page, but will not index the query strings as separate pages? In that case, I should be okay.If the complex query string means the SE's will just ignore the links, then I'll have to come up with something else.
If you need the links on these pages to pass PageRank and to be trackable then 301's are the best way, but no-one can be 100% sure that any given engine will not take a disliking to the way you do it.
Still on tracking, what if I take all links I want to track, and point them at the page I want them to wind up on, with even a simple query string. Then, (since the page is PHP anyway), the first thing on the page could be to log the query string, then use header(Location...) to give a 301 redirect to the same page with the query string stripped off. Is that a "sneaky redirect," or are there other issues with such an approach?
It's not a 'sneaky redirect' as many sites use such a routine (although often in .htaccess) to strip querystrings from pages that should not have them. This gets around the issue of someone linking to the page like this:
page.htm?whatevertheyput
Although often unintended, quite often such a link can create duplicate content according to search engines (as they are too dumb to figure out what happened).
On the second scenario, the landing pages, I also know what you mean about not linking to the landing page from my main site. I've done things like this before and they definitely do need to be landing pages only, as you said. However, I'm not just going to be doing AdWords with this page. I'll be doing several marketing things with it, and I was hoping to pick up some PR and inbound link credit at the same time. But I question whether I'll get those benefits if each incoming link is indexed as a separate query string. Perhaps I should again try the 301 technique mentioned above?
I know it's perfectly possible to run any number of pages from a single script, just because you can does not mean you should. There are times that it does work though.
On that point I have been developing a Yellow Pages site that has millions of pages, yet it runs from a few scripts. They are very carefully thought out and use .htaccess to change this:
example.com/one/two/three/
to this:
example.com/script.php?q1=one&q2=two&q3=three
It could be that .htaccess could help you make the advertising and marketing pages appear different even if they run internally from the same script but it's probably going much further than you want.
