Can trackingcodes in your url be seen as duplicate content or break other rules?

[wellnesswooz]

I recently gave ReachLocal control to manage my Adwords campagne. I didnt want "Reverse Proxy" on so I decided to go with the Remote Conversion Tracking. So they track my website in every stap of the way. Therefor I had to place a Javascript on each page.

But what worries me are these kind of URL's I see appearing in my Analytics account:

/webpaginaname.html?scid+29903&cid=12343&tc+13012316371028544&rl_key=32850e0a2d4499e02a711d0b969044d2&kw+8307565&pub_cr_id=16701148613&dynamic_proxy=1&primary_serv=www.website.com&rl_track_landing_pages=1

Could this be seen as duplicate content by Google? Or could it break any other rule you know of? Should I be worried?

Thanks a lot!

[wellnesswooz]

Hi Peter, that owuld mean that it is already indexed? Then it would be too late. I want to avoid a problems before they are there. I will PM the exact url.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, it can vary wildly - in some cases, those variants aren't really crawlable and/or Goolge will ignore them. In other cases, they can spin out a lot of duplicates. It's hard to speak to the crawlability without digging into the site, but you can test for indexed copies with a Google query like:

site:example.com inurl:scid

If you're seeing versions of these URLs indexed, then you may have a problem. GWT parameter handling is one option, but you could also use rel=canonical to point these variants back to the original page. It depends a bit on the situation and the scope.

[Ben_Alvord]

I would handle this situation using the URL parameters screen within Google Webmaster Tools (shown in the attached screenshot).  You can add URL parameters into the screen and set them to have 'no effect', which means when Google indexes your site, whatever URL parameters you're set to 'no effect' will be ignored by the spider.

webmaster-tools.png

[josh-riley]

For whatever reason, the URL you posted isn't formatting correctly for me to be able to see it all (it gets cut off), so I apologize if I can't speak directly to your example.

I will tell you from my personal experience that the way our place uses tracking codes has indeed created duplicate content.

Example: www.domain.com?cid=102is the same content as www.domain.com - so unless you prevent it before these URLs get indexed, you can have a mess to clean up. It comes up in Moz, Screaming Frog, etc.

[Ryan_Henry]

With my experience with tracking URLs I have never had an instance of duplicate content.  Although I was working solely with Google Analytics tracking URLs I think you should be safe.

To double check yourself you can run a report in Screaming Frog or check SEOMoz to see if you are getting any duplciate errors or show multiple versions of the same URL in your Screaming Frog report.

I have been using tracking URLs for close to two years now and that is how I always double check myself.