Affiliate links and parameters creating duplicate page titles
-
Hi, we have an affiliate system and use rel=**canonical **to canonicalise them to the right link. Still, we see those links creating duplicate page titles, in Moz crawl and in Google search console.
How are we supposed to treat those links so they do not create duplicate content? Thanks for your help!
-
How long ago did you implement canonicals to fix the issue? Its important to remember that a lot of SEO isn't about quick fixes. Some of these things will take weeks/months to completely filter through and for you to see the outcomes you were looking for.
You could "NoIndex, Follow" the pages if you really wanted to but I'd suggest waiting a bit longer for the canonicals to start working. If the canonicals really don't seem to be working for some/all of those pages, and you don't want to give it more time after a few weeks, then you could reasonably "NoIndex, Follow" the pages... but you could be harming link equity that would have been attributed to the canon page.
As for the 301 idea, it would really depend upon what the filtering parameters are doing. If its filtering out sections of a page for users or its helping you determining lead attribution in analytics, then I wouldn't want to indiscriminately 301 them. If they're being autogenerated but have canonicals in them from the start then you should be fine. Like above though, if after a few weeks of them existing with canonicals Google still is throwing duplicate errors at you for those specific pages then you can NonIndex them if you feel it is necessary.
-
Thanks Mike,
I´m thinking if a no index would be more appropriate...?
Some links with filtering parameters are also appearing, even though they were canonicals too. I´m guessing a 301 would make sense there...?
-
Its important to remember that a Canonical is a suggestion not a directive. So making those canonicals is the right way to do it but the search engines and crawlers will determine at their leisure whether they believe the canonical is right or not. Sometimes its a quick fix, and some times they don't accept the canonical at all. If the pages are exact duplicates then Google will get the picture eventually and start recognizing it. As for the Moz crawler, I haven't had a paid account in a while so I can't speak to the way the system works currently but I do know that it used to be an issue where the Moz crawler would never seem to properly recognize a canonicalized duplicate... so that may still be the issue,
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
-
Blocking external links in Robots.txt - need advice on Best Practice
I look after an affiliate site that is doing quite well in the search rankings. We've been doing a review of our practices and one thing that has cropped up is our robots.txt. In it, we disallow Google from crawling external links. This used to be best practice in the affiliate industry a couple of years ago, but I wanted to know if this is still the case, and what the implications are if we were to: a/ leave it as is? b/ allow crawling? Thanks in advance.
Affiliate Marketing | | Ben_Malkin_Develo0 -
Before I request hundreds of links for "nofollow" I want to verify I'm doing the right thing
Happy Thanksgiving Mozers, In my efforts to get rid of a Google penalty, I've come to the conclusion that all the travel agents who link to our site with a unique code, are technically affiliates because they get commission. Therefore we need to get all of them to switch their links to "rel=nofollow". I'm worried this shift will cost us in search rankings, especially since none of our competitors require nofollow tags. So before I actually begin requiring the switch, I wanted to just double check that I'm not misinterpreting Google. Our travel agents are paid commission on every sale (whether their customers click the link from their website to ours, or calls in and gives us that agent's code. So even though our travel agents aren't technically part of an "affiliate program" run through CJ or anything, they are in Google's eyes affiliates of my company. Therefore their links with their personal codes all need to be nofollow. Am I correct on this? I can't find anywhere where Google goes into great depth explaining various types of affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing | | Patrick_G0 -
Which is the Best Affiliate Marketing Platform in Australia?
We have 1 eCommerce website (www.bannerbuzz.com.au) for printing products like banners, signs, banner stands, teardrop flags and more... We want to start affiliate marketing for our products with CPA model. So, Do anyone have a good experience with Australian affiliate marketing platform. We are having shareasale account for our USA based website, But Shareasale is not that much aggressive in Australia. So we want to finalize 1 platform for affiliate marketing which can have good strength of advertisers and reputation. Thanks,
Affiliate Marketing | | CommercePundit0 -
'legitimate' link wheels
I was wondering what SEOMoz' thoughts are on the mega legitimate link wheel sites that are out there. TechMediaNet have been buying up massive news/media sites which arent really monetised (adsense) like http://www.space.com/ http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/ livescience.com and others and generating, admittedly good quality, curated content. Then seeding them with content with backlinks to their money site, toptenreviews.com which in essence is a review site with thousands of pages loaded with affiliate links no better than any of the other site out there. e.g. http://www.livescience.com/9755-bing.html due to the scale of what they're doing pretty much any keyword search i do with review in it (the last thing i wanted to purchase was a usb 3 hub) ends up with toptenreviews.com dominating the serps presumably due to the high PR the viral nature of the media sites are working with. Do you think Google will crack down on this, or do you think it's capitalism in action? TechMediaNet have invested millions in this project and just gotten another $33 million in funding recently.....
Affiliate Marketing | | idimmu0 -
Amazon Links destroyed my rankings, I removed them, will my site recover?
Hello, Last week I got the glorious idea to put amazon affiliate links on my website. I didn't put a rel=nofollow on them or deindex the pages they were on. Precisely I put some reviews and 10 different amazon links on one page and I put that into my navigation so all inner pages were linking to that page. When Google crawled my page again, I had a 60% traffic drop. 3 days later when I found out what caused this (amazon links) I completely removed the site containing those links and removed all links to that page from my site. Now my rankings are still down, will my site recover from this or is it lost? And how long would you think it'll take?
Affiliate Marketing | | SeeSharp10 -
Duplicate tracking of Affiliate and Organic orders
I started diving into the over lap between Organic and affiliate orders and can see that on average about 10% of my organic orders get tracked as both affiliate and organic (meaning i am paying affiliate commissions on them). I want to be able to better account for the different types of order and where they are coming from. My question is simply if anyone has any ideas as to how better to figure out if those orders should be canceled on the affiliate end or if there is a better way in analytics to see where the order is actually getting attributed to through some type of goal or advanced set up or something (the download of orders from organic that I compared to the affiliate ones was taken from Ecommerce > Transactions > Medium (Organic) then I compared that to the order numbers from the affiliate company I am using). Hope this makes sense and thanks for any information that can help with this!
Affiliate Marketing | | Gordian0 -
Affiliate code in urls? affiliate link landing pages?
Is it considered a good or bad practice to have the affiliate code present in your affiliate link url's ? (as opposed to disguising them with something like phpbay) Does the general public not scour the hover-over url's of links they click? Also, is there any way of keeping customers on site when they click affiliate links? (via frames or something more modern) Or is that frowned upon by advertisers?
Affiliate Marketing | | Mozzin0 -
In search of the perfect SEO affiliate ID'd URL
Hi, I'm building an affiliate system for our website, and I obviously want to gain as much SEO benifit from it as possible. So I am wondering what the optimal solution is with regard to how an affilaite URL is tagged. After looking into it a bit more - I have come up with the following. 1/. Use an affilaite URL idendifier with a #
Affiliate Marketing | | James77
EG like www.mysite.com#123 2/. 301 redirect the affilaite URL to the "real URL"
EG www.mysite.com#123 301 -> www.mysite.com What do you think of this? Thanks0
