Affiliate Link is Trumping Homepage - URL parameter handling?
-
An odd and slightly scary thing happened today: we saw an affiliate string version of our homepage ranking number one for our brand, along with the normal full set of site-links.
We have done the following:
1. Added this to our robots.txt :
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?2. Reinserted a canonical on the homepage (we had removed this when we implemented hreflang as had read the two interfered with each other. We haven't had canonical for a long time now without issue. Is this anything to do with the algo update perhaps?!
The third thing we're reviewing I'm slightly confused about: URL Parameter Handling in GWT. As advised - with regard to affiliate strings - to the question: "Does this parameter change page content seen by the user?" We have NO selected, which means they should be crawling one representative URL. But isn't it the case that we don't want them crawling or indexing ANY affiliate URLs? You can specify Googlebot to not crawl any of particular string, but only if you select: "Yes. The parameter changes the page content." Should they know an affiliate URL from the original and not index them? I read a quote from Matt Cutts which suggested this (along with putting a "nofollow" tag in affiliate links just in case)
Any advice in this area would be appreciated. Thanks.
-
I'm glad to hear you've been sorted out Lawrence Neal. I find it interesting the the other Lawrence saw something similar, and I'll ask around to see if it was a glitch that other people have noticed too.
For anyone reading this wondering what Mr. Neal was referring to in regard to rel canonical / href lang conflict, there's a good writeup of it over at Dejanseo.com and Gianluca Fiorelli mentions it in his comment on Dr. Pete's Rel Canonical uber post here on Moz.
-
Luckily it's disappeared today, which leads me to believe it was a Google-side algo error that was swiftly corrected (nothing we have done will have reflected in the serp so quickly, I doubt)
-
Lets say your site is using php?
Your system no doubt picks up the parameter with a php get and stores it as a session variable.
That is likely all that would need to be done before the page is 301 redirected.
Best thing to do is create a test page with the cod mentioned above on your site and try it
have the page redirect to the homepage and see if that affiliate code is stored.
-
I don't know if this has anything to do with the algo update, but at least your not the only one. I saw a competitor ranking with a second version of their homepage. The second version had utm parameters behind them.
Luckily the page with the utm parameters disappeared from the serps this morning. He was actually ranking first with the normal version and second with the version with the url parameters. This was on some pretty competitive keywords and lasted almost three days.
-
Thanks for your reply, Gary. I'm not entirely sure how our (far reaching and lucrative) affiliate tracking/logging works, but I would have thought 301ing all the links to the original page would sabotage it, no?!
The canonical will certainly work but we've only reinstated it on the homepage as we have 6 other sites that have hreflang alternates in place and the canonical seems to interfere with their function.
-
hmmm.. seems like Google is getting some strong linking signals that this is the popular page to arrive at.
The canonical tag on the homepage is the right way to go.
You could 301 redirect any customer that lands on you with an affiliate code in the url? This would be a very simple bit of code you could even put it in an an include at the top of each page. This way those pages never even exist and you get all the link juice.
One other thing might be to put a noindex on any page that has an affiliate parameter. But you would lose the link juice.
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
-
Surge in spammy links
Hi, Our website www.foodjet.com has recently seen a huge amount of spammy incoming links to non-exisiting URLS: They all target pages that lead to a 404 and which clearly do not exist on our website. Since they have started to appear our DA has plummeted. I have already disavowed some domains, but more re-appear just as fast. I have also checked if our site has been hacked, which does not seem to be the case. What am I missing? And/or what can I do?
Technical SEO | | FoodJEt0 -
Canconical tag on site with multiple URL links but only one set of pages
We have a site www.mezfloor.com which has a number of Url's pointing at one site. As the url's have been in use for many years there are links from many sources include good old fashioned hard copy advertising. We have now decided that it would be better to try to start porting all sources to the .co.uk version and get that listing as the prime/master site. A couple of days ago I went through and used canonical tags on all the pages thinking that would set the priority and that would also strengthen the page in terms of trust due to the reduced duplication. However when I went to scan the site in MOZ the warning that the page redirects came up and I am beginning to think that I need to remove all these canonical tags so that search engines do not get into a confused spiral where we loose the little page rank we have. Is there a way that I can redirect everything except the target URL without setting up a separate master site just for all the other pages to point at.
Technical SEO | | Eff-Commerce0 -
Feefo review links
Hi guys, so we are on feefo and noticed links coming in per review for different anchor text, this will be done on mass due to the amount of reviews we will get - this is all natural but in SEO site-wide links are typically not. How if at all do you think Google will react to this?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Too Many On-Page Links?
How much would this affect my page ranks performance? There are many Too Many On-Page Links? warning on my campaign. should I address this issue right away to fix it or leave it as it would not matter seriously ? I've looked at some of the pages and think all of them are necessary. Could someone help me? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LauraHT0 -
Too Many Internal Links?
Hi Guys, I'm completing a overhawl of our website at the moment have a certain penguin killed our site for our main keyword. I'm currently working on our internal linking as most of our blog posts have a link back to our home page with the main money keyword. At present we have 3,331 internal links and our site has only 1,000 pages. Can you get penalised for having too many internal links with exact match anchors. Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Duplicate pages, overly dynamic URL’s and long URL’s in Magento
Hi there, I’ve just completed the first crawl of my Magento site and SEOMOZ has picked up 1,000’s of duplicate pages, overly dynamic URL’s and long URL’s due to the sort function which appends URL’s with variables when sorting products (e.g. www.example.com?dir=asc&order=duration). I’m not particularly concerned that this will affect our rankings as Google has stated that they are familiar with the structure of popular CMS’s and Magento is pretty popular. However it completely dominates my crawl diagnostics so I can’t see if there are any real underlying issues. Does anyone know a way of preventing this? Cheers,
Technical SEO | | WendyWuTours
Al.1 -
Hyphen in URL
Hi, I would like to know if the following statement holds true today or it doesn't matter whether we use hyphens or underscore If you have a URL like keyword1_keyword2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for keyword1_keyword2 ( highly unlikely ) . But If you have a URL like keyword1-keyword2, that page can be returned for the searches - keyword1,keyword2 and even “keyword1keyword2” Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
URL Rewrite
We are trying to convince a client to do a massive rewrite from all URL's looking like this: "www.company.com/category/categoryId=82374" to something like "www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain" How would you describe the importance and impact of doing URL rewrites to an ecommerce site? What evidence/research can we share with them to convince them it is worth the time and effort to do?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0