Comments on: URL Referrer Tracking

By: Polly Pospyelova

Polly Pospyelova — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:49:52 +0000

Graet post! I have used all of these solutions in one way or the other before except from the canonical URL tag. My preference goes to the redirects and URL fragments. The last one is a very neat solutoin to avoid duplicate URLs on websites where you simply have no choice but have duplicate pages.

Polly

By: Caleb Whitmore

Caleb Whitmore — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:51:09 +0000

Your example for Google Analytics, all respect to my friend Avinash, won’t work with GA. Here’s why:

1) GA can’t deal with # in the URI gracefully. It just ignores # in the utmp= field of a utm.gif tracking hit (what will be produced by running pageTracker._trackPageview();). In order to use the method noted you have to write some additional JavaScript that drops the “#” from the location.hash result, puts the result into a variable, then placed that variable in the customized trackPageview(); call.

2) You completely overlooked the built in facility in Google Analytics for anchor-based campaign tracking parameters. The method is simply pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);. That will let you put your “utm_campaign” custom campaign parameters into the anchor string rather than URI parameters. In my opinion this should be defaulted to true in GA and is always a best practice to use when tagging your pages.

-Caleb

By: Webmaster

Webmaster — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:49:11 +0000

Thanks for this important SEO information! Every SEO should know this!

By: Sankar

Sankar — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:23:51 +0000

Thanks Nathan.

I came to know lots of new points by reading this article. still I am not up to the mark in the points what you have discussed such as reporting using # parameter, canonical tag. Have to do a little more research about it and needs make myself perfect. Bookmarked this url, have to check later in detail.

Thanks
Sankar

By: Winwab

Winwab — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:45:27 +0000

Thanks for sharing this article.

By: zara clothing

zara clothing — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:31:34 +0000

I still don’t get it why some webmasters make multiple pages with the same content ?

By: ADAC

ADAC — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:47:35 +0000

Thanks for the insight into how the search engines look at things. Most of these problems can be easily avoided if you know about them before you start programming the site.

By: Raffi

Raffi — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:37:38 +0000

I know I’m a little bit late to the party, but I have another suggestion for query parameters.

Spiders don’t report a referrer because they are direct-load. You could check for a referrer and when you don’t see one do a 301 redirect to the "clean" URL.

This way if someone else blogs about your URL you get the link credit from Google and can still track visitors that click through. Only "issue" I would see is that you’d lose tracking on someone who bookmarks your URL with parameters (on subsequent visits).

You’re still serving the same content to visitors and bots and you’re doing it without regard to user-agents.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this.

By: WannaDevelop.com

WannaDevelop.com — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:00:14 +0000

I’m going to give this a try.. Very interesting :)

Mike

By: Malte Landwehr

Malte Landwehr — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 04:26:26 +0000

Haven’t read the whole article yet but the first advices sounded great. Bookmarked!