ECommerce Site, URL's, Canonical and Tracking Referral Traffic

[Linwright]

I'm very, very new to eCommerce websites that employ many different URL's to track referral traffic. I have a client that has 18 different URL's that land on the Home Page in order to track traffic from different referral sources. For example:

http://erasedisease.com/?ref=abot  -  Tracks traffic from an affiliate source

http://erasedisease.com/?ref=FB01 - Tracks traffic from a FB Ad

http://erasedisease.com/?ref=sas&SSAID=289169 - Tracks more affiliate traffic

...and the list goes on and on.

My first question is do you think this could hinder our Google rankings? SEOMoz Crawl doesn't show any Duplicate Content Errors, so I guess that's good. I've just been reading a lot about Canonical Url's and eCommerce sites, but I'm not sure if this is a situation where I'd want to use some kind of canonical plugin for this Wordpress website or not.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!!

[Linwright]

Thank you so much guys! This information is incredibly helpful, and easy to transfer over to the client being that it's coming from experts. Thanks again!

[Francisco_Meza]

To answer your 1st question: Yes you are going to have duplicate content issues. SEOmoz won't catch everything especially if you don't put those URLs in a sitemap where they can access it.

Your client is doing it ALL WRONG!

Install Google Analytics. Use the Google Anaytics URL Builder : http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

Log in to GA and go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns.

I just created one for you: http://www.erasedisease.com/?utm_source=SEOmoz&utm_medium=QandA&utm_campaign=Francisco_Meza_affiliate  . Click it and you'll see it populate in GA in a day or two. It'll make sense once you see it in action. Basically you are creating URLs to track campaigns from affiliates. Now you will NEVER have duplicate content issues.

[evolvingSEO]

You definitely need to use a canonical tag to handle tracking URLs. If you're on WordPress I highly recommend using Yoast's SEO Plugin - not only for canonicals, but everything.

You can also handle tracking URLs within Google Webmaster Tools.

-Dan