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I recently made a change that I believe made me sink way down in Google and Yahoo search results and I think I know what did it.
My link partners used to link back directly to my home page, we'll call it mydomain.com
I recently made a change to better count incoming traffic from each link partner. Over 100 of them changed my link per my request and they now link to me with a variable in the URL, like mydomain.com/?xx=12
The xx is a simple variable and the number is unique to each of my link partners contained in a database.
I'm thinking that the engines now see all those inbound links pointing to over 100 separate pages, as my search results dropped dramatically about 3 months after making this change.
I just put a 301 redirect within my index.php page to check for the presence of the "?xx" variable and update my database, then do a 301 redirect to my original homepage....hoping the engines will once again see all these inbound links pointing to my home page as they should.
Am I going to get dinged for this, with so many inbound links being redirected with a 301 and more being added the more I promote the site? I think I see many other sites doing this, but obviously I cannot see their code.
Any help would be appreciated..take care everyone!
If you want to track them such as you are, why not just use logic on your homepage to capture the varaible if present and do a quick insert. This would be better then using a 301 just for that.
