Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I believe that my site might have some problems with the getting some of its pages indexed properly.
The first arise out of our need to track our marketing efforts (tagging parameter values on our links for each marketing banner & link).
To illustrate my point:
On our homepage: www.example.com
We have a link to the following marketing copy page: http://www.example.com/SITE/MIR/OVERVIEW.HTM?dmsource=HP102BFY
We also have another link on the same page which points to the same page:
http://www.example.com/SITE/MIR/OVERVIEW.HTM?dmsource=HP102AML
Is it true that these 2 links are recognized as 2 duplicated pages, and would be penalized accordingly? The trouble is, we have plenty of such links, not because of spamming intentions, but because the parameter (dmsource, for this case) is being used for tracking our marketing efforts (the values of this parameter will eventually be passed to our database, when our users successfully submits the purchase/subscription form).
Will employing the nofollow attribute to such links help us to mitigate this?
Problem is, we want spiders to index our marketing pages too. Will having all our marketing pages links adopting the nofollow attribute mean that Googlebot will not follow those links and thus, our marketing pages will not be indexed (when we badly need them to).
Please do share with us your suggestions to overcome this problem, which will help us to achieve both our goals (tracking effectiveness of our marketing efforts VS getting more inbound links for our marketing pages so that they get properly indexed and ranked).
Secondly, we've also recently discovered that we have quite a number of inbound links within our site to be pointing to the same pages, but with different extensions (.htm and .html).
We've been told that Google sees these pages differently. Is this assumption correct? If that is the case, those pages will also be penalized because they are seen as duplicated. This problem came about because we've had a couple of different development teams working on creating those links for us on different occasions.
What would your recommendation be to mitigate this? (We are not sure which extension to adopt, bearing in mind the possible implications the change will have on the pages mentioned in the short to medium term.)
Any inputs would be appreciated. Thank you.
[edited by: engine at 6:06 pm (utc) on June 5, 2006]
[edit reason] examplified and de-linked [/edit]
