URL String Tracking Question--Need help!
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I am doing some research for a freelance project and found a URL receiving a decent amount of traffic from search with this url string after the normal page url (xxx.com/credit-card-counseling.aspx?match=e&query=debthelper.com&id=22097628847&id=1810807655)
Is this some sort of GA tracking code? Why would it be used on that page to track organic search hits if that happens automatically?
Would love some help figuring this out!
Thanks,
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This is not a Google Analytics tracking code (you can find those specifications here).
This looks more like query parameters that were tacked on by some internal search feature or submission form. Do you have any forms or filters on your site? If so, that could be the cause. It could also be the case that some external site is linking to you and tacking on those parameters for whatever reason.
To solve this issue, just add a canonical tag to the header of all of your pages. This is an SEO best practice that can prevent things like query parameters from messing up your URLs and resulting in possible duplicate content issues. You can also block these parameters explicitly in Google Webmaster Tools, but I would start with the canonical approach first.
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Hmm not sure I understand. Why would that link url be attracting organic search hits?
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It looks like the URL has been scraped. The tags don't conform to Analytics tag conventions. You can find more on that here.
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