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How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
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I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this:
http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/
The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com.
Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page.
How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
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Hi Alick,
I should explain that we're a landing page platform so the /clkn/ tracking links that are getting indexed are getting indexed on our customer domains, not ours. Therefore we'd have no access to Google Search Console to make any tweaks.
i.e. http://customerdomain.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com
Secondly, this URL ^ does not contain any parameters, so the fix you mentioned above doesn't apply.
Any other ideas?
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