Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
To promote the widgets, I put up banner ads across roughly 1400 pages on the site. In order to track the number of clicks on the banners using my web stats program, I had each banner link to a CDONTS page that redirects to the appropriate html page. So, someone clicking on an Acme banner is directed to cdoAcme.asp, and then redirected to Acme.html. The CDONTS pages don't have any text. They just have <%response.redirect="Acme.html" %>
The Acme.html page was ranking well (first or second page for its search terms). But today I discovered that Google has the cdoAcme.asp page on the first page of the search results. The description and title are from the Acme.html page. And the Acme.html page appears to be in the supplemental index now.
Am I in danger of being punished for duplicate content? And is there any way out of this? If I link the banners straight to the Acme.html page, anyone clicking on the results in Google is going to get a "page not found" error.
Any comments or suggestions are very much appreciated.
Most of the time there is no punishment or penalty for having duplicate url. Rather, the duplicate urls are just filtered out of the results. However, using mutliple urls does split up your potential PageRank by distributing it to many different urls. And in this case, 1400 dupes is apparently causing Google a problem, not sitewide.
What a webmaster normally needs to do is to send a 301 http status along with the redirect, and response.redirect does not automatically do that. You can manually add some code to change the response.header to 301. There may be some complications depending on a server's configuration. If so, check in with our IIS server forum [webmasterworld.com].
However, I did say "what you NORMALLY need." In this case, you are also talking about purchased advertising links. Google does not want to see purchased links sending a PR vote. So check out this thread [webmasterworld.com] and some of the massive discussion that has followed on Google's shift in their guidelines. Any url you intend to see rank might need to give up accumulating its ranking support from paid links.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:35 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2008]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]
There are three rotating banners. Each one links to a CDONTS page that redirects to the appropriate page on my site. For example, cdoAcme.asp redirects to Acme.html, cdoWidget.asp redirects to Widget.html, and cdoBlueWidget.asp redirects to BlueWidget.html.
There aren't 1400 different pages linking to the .html pages. There's just those three banners on the 1400 pages linking to three .html pages by way of three CDONTS pages.
I've done this before to measure clicks, but I've never seen Google index the CDONTS pages.
What concerns me, aside from losing ranking if Google decides that the CDONTS pages are improper somehow, is linking. With this development, I'm uncertain whether I should garner any links to the .html pages, since they're in the supplemental index, or get links to the CDONTS pages when I'm not sure how Google will eventually treat them.
Also, these are not paid links. They're pages on my site that link to other pages on my site.
