What is the right way to link to your main site?

[JonsonSwartz]

Hi,

we have a system for tracking the leads that comes from a specific affiliate website. each affiliate has a unique tracking code.

not only for affiliates that work with us but also for the SEO team has an affiliate tracking code so our bosses can track the leads and traffic that come from the activity of the SEO team.

this means, links towards our website look like:

www.mydomain.com/?t_src=campaign&t=AFF&t_cre=links&A=371

www.mydomain.com/?A=371

I have few questions about this:

1. This is the right way to link to my company site? How dose  google crawl those link? It's can harm the link value?

2. What is my option to show my boss all the traffic / leads that our seo team brings to the site trough Google Analytics?

Hope to get your support.

Thanks in advance.

[Everett]

Hell Joni,

Although Thomas seems to be answering someone else's question here (replied in the wrong window?) Mihai has done a great job of providing you with actionable advice related to your question.

Yes, those kinds of links can be a problem IF you do not use a rel canonical tag. However, it is not uncommon for websites to use tracking parameters in the URL. This is fine as long as you use a rel canonical tag and/or tell Google and Bing to ignore those parameters. Most likely Google already knows to ignore them anyway. Please read these articles and let us know if you still need help with this...

Article by Dr. Pete on Rel Canonical Tags http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Setting up campaign tracking URLs If you use Google Analytics: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

About Rel Canonical Tag Support by Google:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

About URL Parameters: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en

[JonsonSwartz]

Hi,

Thanks for you replay but what i'm trying to ask here is if this kind of links:

www.mydomain.com/?t_src=campaign&t=AFF&t_cre=links&A=371

www.mydomain.com/?A=371

Can make me a problem with my link building strategy? you see, those kind of link is not look like a direct link to my site even though it is! So i'm asking how google refer those links?

I going to start a new press release campaign and want to track all over the link & the conversation that come from there.

Hope to get you supper again.

Thanks in advance.

[BlueprintMarketing]

http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

Have you ever redirected a page hoping to see a boost in rankings, but nothing happened? Or worse, traffic actually went down?

When done right, 301 redirects have awesome power to clean up messy architecture, solve outdated content problems and improve user experience — all while preserving link equity and your ranking power.

When done wrong, the results can be disastrous.

In the past year, because Google cracked down hard on low quality links, the potential damage from 301 mistakes increased dramatically. There's also evidence that Google has slightly changed how they handle non-relevant redirects, which makes proper implementation more important than ever.

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From Dr. Pete's post - An SEO's Guide to HTTP Status Codes

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Semantic relevance 101: anatomy of a "perfect" redirect

A perfect 301 redirect works as a simple “change of address” for your content. Ideally, this means everything about the page except the URL stays the same including content, title tag, images, and layout.

When done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a 301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity.

The new page doesn’t have to be a perfect match for the 301 to pass equity, but problems arise when webmasters use the 301 to redirect visitors to non-relevant pages. The further away you get from semantically relevant content, the less likely your redirect will pass maximum link juice.

For example, if you have a page about “labrador,” then redirecting to a page about “dogs” makes sense, but redirecting to a page about “tacos” does not.

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301 redirecting everything to the home page

Savvy SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s, or soft 404s at best.

This means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity at all.

While it’s difficult to prove exactly how search engines handle mass home page redirects, it’s fair to say that any time you 301 a large number of pages to a single questionably relevant URL, you shouldn’t expect those redirects to significantly boost your SEO efforts.

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**Better alternative: **When necessary, redirect relevant pages to closely related URLs. Category pages are better than a general homepage.

If the page is no longer relevant, receives little traffic, and a better page does not exist, it’s often perfectly okay to serve a 404 or 410 status code.

Danger: 301 redirects and bad backlinks

Before Penguin, SEOs widely believed that bad links couldn’t hurt you, and redirecting entire domains with bad links wasn’t likely to have much of an effect.

Then Google dropped the hammer on low-quality links.

If the Penguin update and developments of the past year have taught us anything, it’s this:

When you redirect a domain, its bad backlinks go with it.

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Webmasters often roll up several older domains into a single website, not realizing that bad backlinks may harbor poison that sickens the entire effort. If you’ve been penalized or suffered from low-quality backlinks, it’s often easier and more effective to simply stop the redirect than to try and clean up individual links.

Individual URLs with bad links

The same concept works at the individual URL level. If you redirect a single URL with bad backlinks attached to it, those bad links will then point to your new URL.

In this case, it’s often better to simply drop the page with a 404 or 410, and let those links drop from the index.

Infinite loops and long chains

If you perform an SEO audit on a site, you’ll hopefully discover any potentially harmful redirect loops or crawling errors caused by overly-complex redirect patterns.

While it’s generally believed that Google will follow many, many redirects, each step has the potential to diminish link equity, dilute anchor text relevance, and lead to crawling and indexing errors.

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One or two steps is generally the most you want out of any redirect chain.

New changes for 302s

SEOs typically hate 302s, but recent evidence suggests search engines may now be changing how they handle them — at least a little.

Google knows that webmasters make mistakes, and recent tests by Geoff Kenyon showed that 302 redirects have potential to pass link equity. The theory is that 302s (meant to be temporary) are so often implemented incorrectly, that Google treats them as “soft” 301s.

So, not only do search engines limit us when we try to get too clever, but they also help to keep us from shooting ourselves in the foot.

[mihaiaperghis]

Hey Joni,

1. There's no problem crawling those links (Google campaign tracking uses parameter-based URLs as well). To ensure these links don't cause duplicate content issues, either set Webmaster Tools to ignore these parameters or use a rel="canonical" tag on your pages to indicate the correct URL (the last method would be better since it works for all search engines).

2. You can either use the Google Analytics campaign tracking by changing the name of your parameters to match the ones used by GA, or you can use event tracking with your own parameters through JavaScript (you can see an example of using this for tracking keyword ranking)

Hope this helps!