Can a tracking url be a problem in search engine indexing?

[smallbiz]

We add a tracking portion to the urls that we give to our advertisers (www.example.com/page1.asp/var=1?Source=advertiserA).

A few years back, we had a problem where google indexed the same page from our site multiple times, once each with each of our advertisers. For example they would have the page above with 'source=advertiserA', 'source=advertiserb", etc.

As part of the solution, we added a script on our site. When it detected urls with that advertiser tracking, it stripped the "?source=advertiserX" portion of the urls and passed the value as a hidden value. This way, bots could not index multiple urls with different source values landing to the same page.

That solution is now interfering with our analytics so I was wondering if, based on what Google and others are doing today, there would still be confusion and/or penalties if we stopped stripping the tracking.

Thanks,

Mike

[edited by: tedster at 8:29 pm (utc) on Feb. 20, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

I'd suggest using the new canonical tag [webmasterworld.com] if you really need to change what you've been doing. It's still preferable to find a way to handle the analytics "invisibly" to Google, but this looks like the next best thing.

[ogletree]

It would be better to build in code that would detect this code and 301 redirect to the right page. If this causes problems with tracking you could set it up so that it 301 redirects only for bots. You probably only need to do it for yahoo, msn, and google. To be honest I don't like that new tag. Google themselves said the tag is just a suggestion. You don't want to make google think. Spoonfeed everything to google. If you just use that tag google still has to download all the pages and determine which one is the real one.

And really you should use "nofollow" on all advertising. That would be considered a paid link.