Backlinks to unique login pages
-
Hi There,
This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help!
The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform.
For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with.
Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields.
So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this?
Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL?
Thanks in advance!
Henry
-
Cheers Bryce!
-
I don't think that should be an issue. The only time it would really be a problem is if you were doing "sniffing" for google bot and then displaying something different all-together.
The canonical tag isn't a bad idea either.
-
Thanks for that tip mate.
If all the customers were to link oursitesname.com/login. Would Google be suspicious if we were showing different content (branded login pages with text) to different referrers? I mean before they are logged in.
-
You have a measure of control over how Google treats parameters.
Log into Google Webmaster Tools > Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling tab. You can then add or modify any parameter and tell Google how they should react (i.e. ignore, dont ignore, let Google decide, or use a specific value).
Bing has a similar process.
-
Hi Ryan,
This is a very valid point and would be easy to do if the referrer was always coming directly from the customer site. The issue is that sometimes the customers (which are libraries) send their traffic over a 3<sup>rd</sup> party referrer (so the user can input a library card number) and some libraries use the same 3<sup>rd</sup> party referrer which makes things messy. This is the case about 40% of the time.
Any suggestions?
On a side note… How does Google treat the ? parameter in URLs (e.g. www.oursitesname.com/?customer-indentifier). Do these types of links carry the same link power as without the parameter?
Thanks for your help mate!
Henry
-
Hi Henry.
My primary question to you is regarding the approach you are taking. Why create a unique page for each customer?
It is a common practice among websites to offer login screens for users, and to customize pages based on cookies or login information. This can be accomplished without providing new pages on your site with unique URLs, but rather by allowing users to customize their page.
When I open my browser and go to Google.com, I am automatically logged in and I see my current background image of a lion. The page URL is shown as google.com and it is customized for me. This example is rather simple, but you can display current information relevant to your customer in the same manner.
I would suggest speaking to your website developer about making your site more dynamic in this regard. You will receive not only SEO benefits, but your site should become easier to maintain as well. If you do take this approach, be sure to work with your customers to update their current links, and to properly 301 your pages.
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
-
Wrong Page Ranking?!?
I did some research today, one of our keywords is "mobile column lifts." I recently redid a page on our website to target this keyword. When I Google search this keyword I see that a page on our site titled "Reconditioned Mobile Lifts" is ranking for this keyword. I took a look with Moz, our mobile column lifts page ranks 90 for the keyword, and the reconditioned lifts page ranks 73 the keyword. Why is this happening? How can I fix this? https://www.slec.com/mobile-column-lifts/ https://www.slec.com/reconditioned-mobile-lifts/
Technical SEO | | slecinc0 -
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Will getting backlinks to landing page from low quality sites negatively affect SEO?
I've recently started an initiative at my company to get our customers to publish a blog post about our company and to include a link to a landing page which sits on a subdomain attached to our main domain. The reason for directing visitors to the post to a landing page is to help with conversion. I've recently been thinking that couldn't the backlinks to this landing page from our customers' blogs (generally small sites) have a negative impact on the overall SEO of my companies domain? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JustinButlion0 -
What is meant by to many on page links
I have just done the report for my site http://www.in2town.co.uk and it says i have 246 on page links but i am not sure how come i have got that many. I know i have a large number of links and in the old days it says that you should keep the links under 100 but now with website speed and the net, people are saying this is no longer listened to. A report i read said that the links should not confuse the reader or put them off, so i am just wondering what your thoughts are on a site with over a 100 links on the home page and also if my site does have to many links what should i do about it. I cannot understand why it is showing 246 when i do not see that many on the page, any advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Unique shop
Hello I have several websites www.example1c.om and www.example2.com and I would like to create e unique shop page where all the users that want to buy would be redirected, something like shop.example.com. Now, each website has its own catalog section but with this new system, if a user clicks on buy he will be redirected to shop.example.com like this: www.example1c.om/catalog click on BUY and redirected to shop.example.com www.example2c.om/catalog click on BUY and redirected to shop.example.com shop.example.com will be on a different server than the other 2 websites. Is it ok if I do a 301 from 1 server to the other server or I can be penalized? thank you
Technical SEO | | andromedical0 -
No_index of parent page
Hi, sorry its a Friday question... Page A: www.example.com/house/ Page B: www.example.com/house/kitchen Can I 'no_index' page A without it effecting page B being indexed? Views? Many thanks!
Technical SEO | | Richard5551 -
Redirecting over-optimised pages
Hi One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site. I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks. My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Too Many On Page LInk
The analysis of my site is showing that I have a problem with too many on-page links. Most of this is due to our menu, and wanting users to be able to quickly get to the shopping category they are looking for. We end up with over 200 links in order to get the menu we want. How are other people dealing with a robust menu, but avoiding getting dinged for too many links? One of our pages in question is: http://www.milosport.com/category/2176-snowboards.aspx
Technical SEO | | dantheriver0