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My site ignores the "?from=site" construct, so google
following each of these links from external sites will end up on exactly the same widget1.html page.
My questions:
1) Is this a "safe" thing to do? I want to track conversions from each of these sites to figure out where I get the "best" traffic from, but I don't want to trip any bad duplicate content penalty (if there is such a thing).
2) Will any PR passed from siteA, siteB, siteC get added to my core widget1.html page, due to google noticing that all three url's are the same, and therefore sum the PR? Or would I be better off skipping the?from=site construct because I'll lose the PR from these links.
In the big picture, it would be better to use a cookie/javascript solution that logged referral data. That way all the sites linking to you could use a common url. Doing that would help increase the PageRank to the specific page.
Do you know that the PR is not combined when google detects a duplicate page? I understand that only one page will end up in the index.
Thanks,
Before, we had a product catalog, housed in a DB, but for most live purposes was stored in an XML document. The catalog included all our categories, like red widgets and blue widgets, domestic widgets and imported widgets. But a red widget can also be imported, so that product appeared twice in the XML file, in two categories. The XML gave each child node of a <category> element an IDREF code number.
When a user on our site clicked on a product, the URL included the CATEGORY SPECIFIC code for the product. So a red, imported widget could be accessed by /product.asp?code=123 AND /product.asp?code=321. The reason for this was that we could then manipulate the navigation and look of the site to match the category our user was viewing.
I became concerned about how this linking "topography" would affect our rankings ,specifically in regards to internal distribution of PR, and to a lesser degree external deep links.
Previously, our red international widget would appear three times on our site. Once in red widgets, once in international widgets, and once with a category neutral URL in our site index. So our product CONTENT has three links pointing to it, but those three links pointed to three different pages. And occasionally we have our product pages linked to from outside, and in that case I had to choose which one of the three URLS I wanted to give the PR boost to.
The way I think about it now is about concentration and dilution of SEO resources. Besides the on-page stuff that I can do, like improving my titles and keyword occurance and stuff, there are certain external factors like incoming anchor text and incoming PR. I can spread that out over 3 URLS, or I can throw it all at just one. By in effect tripling the SEO resources of that one URL, it should rank higher.
Another point to consider is that I was worried about multiple listings and being hit with duplicate content bans or complaints from competitors.
The result is that in the last 2 days the apparent size of my site has shrunk by a factor of three. I've made every URL in our site into the category neautral one. We;ve hacvked the navigation so we still have most of the functionality of the original version. A nice side effect of this may be being more spider friendly, so that Googlebot finds all of my pages faster (I'm still in new site limbo).
Anyway, I'm a rank amatuer at this, so if anyone with some more experience wants to shoot holes in my theories, I'd appreciate it. Thats more of less why I took the time to write this. :) And this marks my first really long, substantial post to WW. Whew... If this contributes to the general level of discussion, I'd be honoured.
Darryl.
