Page Tracking using Custom URLs - is this viable?

[usnseomoz]

Hi Moz community!

I’ll try to make this question as easy to understand as possible, but please excuse me if it isn’t clear.

Just joined a new team a few months ago and found out that on some of our most popular pages we use “custom URLs” to track page metrics within Google Analytics. NOTE: I say “custom URLs” because that is the best way for me to describe them.

As an example:

• This page exists to our users: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Ram_HD/2012/photos-interior/

• But this is the URL we have coded on the page: cars-trucks/used-cars/reviews/2012-Ram-HD/photos-interior/ (within the custom variance script labeled as “var l_tracker=” )

• It is this custom URL that we use within GA to look up metrics about this page.

• This is just one example of many across our site setup to do the same thing

• Here is a second example:

  • Available page to user: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Cadillac_ATS/2015/
  • Custom “var l_tracker=” /cars-trucks/2015-Cadillac-ATS/overview/

• NOTE: There is a small amount of fear that the above method was implemented years ago as a work-around to a poorly structured URL architecture. Not validated, but that is a question that arose.

Main Questions:

• Is the above implementation a normal and often used method to track pages in GA? (coming from an Omniture company before – this would not be how we handled page level tracking)
• Team members at my current company are divided on this method. Some believe this is not a proper implementation and are concerned that trying to hide these from Google will raise red flags (i.e. fake URLs in general = bad)
• I cannot find any reference to this method anywhere on the InterWebs

-          If method is not normal: Any recommendations on a solution to address this?

Potential Problems?

• GA is currently cataloguing these tracking URLs in the Crawl Error report. Any concerns about this?
• The team wants to hide the URLs in the Robots.txt file, but some team members are concerned this may raise a red flag with Google and hurt us more than help us.

Thank you in advance for any insight and/or advice.

Chris

[usnseomoz]

any help?