Do tracking URL's hurt your SE exposure?

[jrklucky]

Please excuse me if this seems like a naive question but I thought you folks might be able to help me.

We have a site that was launched about 1.5 months ago and have been aggressively using cpc search and cpc banner advertising for the initial marketing.

The site has been submitted to the main search engines but has not found its way onto google or others except through the cpc ads found on the major sites displaying them. The problem is that all of our cpc links point to a third party system which provides tracking services to us. After the user goes to the third party tracking link he/she is then redirected to our main URL to our site, so it seems that the search engines would not register the cpc links as pointing to our site and therefore would not crawl it or factor the referring links in to our ranking.

.......Is that true? Would this be a reason why google would not list the main site or recognize our domain but still pull up all of the CPC ads we list on the other major sites when queried?

We are trying to figure out ways to take advantage of the exposure we are paying for through cpc and are figuring that we might have to set up the CPC links to point to our own site and then redirect to the tracking URL, which then redirects back to our system (whew!..)

So..... Would this work? Would this increase the number of links directly back to our site in the eyes of google and also increase the # of spiders crawling through it, etc.?

Thanks!

[skiguide]

No, tracking URL's don't hurt your SE exposure - most spiders don't usually crawl PPC links. (edited to add...well, not exactly true - but that's only in terms of index-connect XML feed type programs, but I suspect you mean basic Overture, Google type PPC)

>>The site has been submitted to the main search engines but has not found its way onto google or others

First question, regarding your comment above - has the site been properly optimized? and have you utilized the paid submit options for spidering (pay for inclusion in Inktomi, Lycos/AlltheWeb, Ask, AltaVista)? Did you do the Express submission at Yahoo, LookSmart?
Have you submitted to the ODP? is it indexed there yet?

Yahoo & ODP typically help you get into google quickly, but you may have also just missed their crawl when you launched, and since the site's only been live for 1.5 months, you might just want to wait until the next update (end of this month/beginning of October) before you panic.

redirecting links from your CPC programs won't help your link popularity. You need to get those key directory listings first which will help link pop, and also actively seek out quality links from portals and content sites related to your website's industry.

hope that helps answer your questions.

[jrklucky]

Thanks, that does help!

Yes, we listed in ODP and we just started to use the paid inclusion a couple of weeks ago (including Yahoo).

Here is another twist to the question... We were also thinking of using the tracking URL's for some search engines...is this a bad idea? and if not, then would it necessarily bring up the issue I was asking about in the first post? Would this hamper crawls and ranking in Google, etc? The reason why we are trying to use the tracking system is that it tracks all the way through to purchases and amount spent, etc... it is tied into our back end so we can see how many customers from a source turned into buyers and for how much, etc...

So if we use it for the SE's then we will truly see how effective the results are that we get.

Thanks again!