URL Formatting for Internal Link Tagging
-
After doing some research on internal campaign link tagging, I have seen conflicting viewpoints from analytics and SEO professionals regarding the most effective and SEO-friendly way to tag internal links for a large ecommerce site.
It seems there are several common methods of tagging internal links, which can alter how Google interprets these links and indexes the URLs these links point to.
- Query Parameter - Using ? or & to separate a parameter like cid that will be appended to all internal-pointing links. Since Google will crawl and index these, I believe this method has the potential of causing duplicate content.
- Hash - Using # to separate a parameter like cid that will be appended to all internal-pointing links.
- Javascript - Using an onclick event to pass tracking data to your analytics platform
- Not Tagging Internal Links - While this method will provide the cleanest possible internal link paths for Google and users navigating the site and prevent duplicate content issues, analytics will be less effective.
For those of you that manage SEO or analytics for large (1 million+ visits per month) ecommerce sites, what method do you employ and why?
Edit* - For this discussion, I am only concerned with tagging links within the site that point to other pages within the same site - not links that come from outside the site or lead offsite.
Thank you
-
Thanks for the answer. I will be using Ensighten to manage the link tagging, so any of the options I presented can be utilized.
Have you found any negative consequences associated with using the query parameter to tag internal links, such as duplicate pages indexed? Or does the Webmaster Tools setup and canonical tags eliminate the chance for this happening?
The query parameter is also used in the URL outside of tagging (for sorting, brand, and other refiners). Is it possible to specify that you want certain query parameter-appended URLs crawled and not others?
-
I manage a large traffic ecommerce website and use Google Tag Manager to tag all internal links for review in GA.
If you want to use a query parameter, which I also actively use, you can apply settings in Google Webmaster Tools to ignore them and not cause duplicate content issues.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
In google analytic for google /cpc it is showing url with 404 which even not exists in my database
Hello All, In google analytic for google /cpc it is showing url with 404 which even not exists in my database that also more than 300 per day. How can it is possible? it is showing /black-friday-offers but I don't have such page. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | pragnesh96390 -
International SEO Domains & Avg Session Duration
I have a couple questions 1) Is there any SEO value to forwarding multiple domains to the same domain? For instance, we own dozens of of the same domain name but with International extensions. I haven't seen much on this topic and assume that Google ignores such domain names (they don't really have much of any links to them). 2) Is there any research on whether time on site is declining across the web? I've noticed a trend over the years but I want to make sure this is a standard user behavior as people jump around quicker and search hop for information.
Reporting & Analytics | | ScottOlson0 -
Page Views for a List of URL's (Excel & Analytics)
I've been playing around with a few excel plugins trying to get the visit count for over 350 different URL's on the same website. I cant seem to find a function that can do this. Can anyone advise a work around or a way i can achieve this? Greg
Reporting & Analytics | | AndreVanKets0 -
Open internal links in a new tab increase bonus rate?
Hello! This week I used a simple method to reduce my blog Google Analytics bounce rate. My blog all the posts are guides, in order to follow them, user need to download a zip file (same zip file). Otherwise they can't. Therefore I added a separate blog post to download all the necessary files. As a result of that I can reduce my bounce rate from 62-70% to 45-50% level. Now I'm thinking to open that zip file download page in a new tab. If I open my blog zip file download page, in a new tab. It will again increase my bounce rate? I reduced my bounce rate using that zip file download page. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Godad0 -
How serious are the Duplicate page content and Tags error?
I have a travel booking website which reserves flights, cars, hotels, vacation packages and Cruises. I encounter a huge number of Duplicate Page Title and Content error. This is expected because of the nature of my website. Say if you look for flights between Washington DC and London Heathrow you will at least get 60 different options with same content and title tags. How can I go about reducing the harm if any of duplicate content and meta tags on my website? Knowing that invariably I will have multiple pages with same content and tags? Would appreciate your advice? S.H
Reporting & Analytics | | sherohass0 -
Google News traffic spike mystery; referring URLs all blank, Omniture tags didn't fire.
Our content is occasionally featured in Google News. We recently have had two episodes where this happened, but (a) nearly all the referring URLs were blank, and (b) our backend logs show 3-4x more requests for the article in question than Omniture does. In other words, hundreds of thousands of visitors requested a URL from our site (as proven by the traffic logs), but don't seem to have come from Google News (because HTTP_REFERER was blank), and didn't execute the onpage javascript tag to notify Omniture of the pageview. Perhaps this has nothing to do with Google News, but it is too strong a coincidence that the two times we were on there recently, the same thing happened: big backend traffic spike that is not seen by Omniture. It is as if Google News causes browsers to pre-fetch our article without executing the javascript on the page. And without sending a referring URL. Has anyone else seen anything like this before? Stats from the recent episode:
Reporting & Analytics | | mcglynn
- 835,000 HTTP requests for the article URL (logged by our servers) - these requests came from 280,000 distinct IP addresses (70% US) - the #1 referring URL is blank. This accounts for 99.4% of requests. Which, in itself, is hard to believe. These people had to come from somewhere. I believe browsers don't pass HTTP_REFERER when you click from an SSL page to a non-SSL page, but I think Google News doesn't bounce users to SSL by default.That said, we do see other content pages with 70-90% blank referring URLs. Rarely 99+% though.0 -
My first campaign identidied long URLs
Hello! 🙂 I've just created my first campaign, and the crawling proccess have detected posts with long URL (more than 70 characters). If I change it, i.e., alter the URL's, can some problem happens to my blog? Or do I have to disconsider this problem and just "work correctly" from now on? Thanks in advance for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Andarilho0 -
Does prevent links from being included in Google Webmaster linking sites report?
My client has clean links in edit from nytimes.com. The links do not have nofollow tags. Google Webmaster stopped including links from nytimes.com in the external linking domains report and we don't know why since the URL is still live. The nytimes.com URL includes this tag in the source code: Are links on pages with NOARCHIVE still counted in Google Webmaster linking domains reports?
Reporting & Analytics | | ebenthurston0