URLs with Campaign ids showing as duplicate content.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

For one of my client site, a multiple online promotions are being done simultaneously. For this we are tracking them through individual campaign ids.

I used to think this was fine as all other brands do it the same way until recently when i was doing a deep analysis and found that in WMT, Google is reporting the URL www.example.com and www.example.com/?campid=abc as two different URL with differnt number of external links as well as showing them in Duplicate Titles and Descriton under content analysis.

What is the best solution for this situation as we cannot drop the campid's.

[g1smd]

This is one use for the 'canonical tag' recently announced.

Personally, I'd 301 redirect and set a cookie.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

However, if I put a Canonical link tag won't it go in a loop?

[Shaddows]

No, you just strip the campid sring from the URL; the canonical version would be the one without the ID.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I am a bit confuse here.
Kindly confirm: to make the URL www.example.com canonical for www.example.com/?campid=12, I would need to implement the canonical link element in www.example.com page itself (no other version exists).

Will this not create a loop when the crawler comes to www.example.com next time.

[tedster]

If the crawler requests www.example.com the content will be indexed as that exact url - the domain root.
If the crawler requests www.example.com/?campid=12 the content will still be indexed as www.example.com

To put it another way, the query string url www.example.com/?campid=12 will no longer show in Google's search results. All of its measured values will be "combined" with the simple domain root, as if there were a 301 redirect in place on your server. No loop.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Thanks everyone for your responses.

I will get this set straight away and will wait to see how things go, especially what changes are reflected in WMT.