URL with tracking code

[RuudHeijnen]

Hi there,

At the company i am currently working for we have a problem with shortcut url with tracking in it.

They send a lot of brochures with a shortcut URL which redirects to the page of the event with tagging.

For example

The real URL is:
http://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/

The URL in the brochure is:
www.sbo.nl/schoolleiderpo

this then redirects to: h
ttp://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/?utm_source=direct&utm_medium=shortcut&utm_campaign=schoolleiderpo

Now we can measure the effect of the brochure on on-line traffic and conversion. This is great but a lot of website link to that shortcut url and if the event is put offline the links to it generate an 404. We have now about 800 backlinks that generate this 404 and i want to fix it. Another big problem  "i think" is the possibility that google will index this url with tagging.

Now i have 2 options:

1. look at al the url with that 404 and redirect them with a 301 to the best page

2. create the shortcut on an page that is most suitable but then i will get the tagging in the URL and i guess google will see this as dublicate content.

It is possible that in the future the shortcut url will be used again. What would you suggest as the best sollution.

[RuudHeijnen]

Thanks Geoff.

Will work on the rel=canonical.

Problem is that we have like 60 pages like this with each 10 or more backlinks. For the total site it is something like 800 backlinks.

Well work to do i guess.

[SEM-Freak]

Hi,

I would add:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/"> in your tag

This tells search engines the real name of the page.

I would definitely send the URL with 800 backlinks to a permanent page on your site