URL Parameter Being Improperly Crawled & Indexed by Google

[kevin_reyes]

Hi All,

We just discovered that Google is indexing a subset of our URL’s embedded with our analytics tracking parameter. For the search “dresses” we are appearing in position 11 (page 2, rank 1) with the following URL:

www.anthropologie.com/anthro/category/dresses/clothes-dresses.jsp?cm_mmc=Email--Anthro_12--070612_Dress_Anthro-_-shop

You’ll note that “cm_mmc=Email” is appended. This is causing our analytics (CoreMetrics) to mis-attribute this traffic and revenue to Email vs. SEO.

A few questions:

1)    Why is this happening? This is an email from June 2012 and we don’t have an email specific landing page embedded with this parameter. Somehow Google found and indexed this page with these tracking parameters. Has anyone else seen something similar happening?
2)    What is the recommended method of “politely” telling Google to index the version without the tracking parameters? Some thoughts on this:
   a.    Implement a self-referencing canonical on the page.
          -    This is done, but we have some technical issues with the canonical due to our ecommerce platform (ATG). Even though page source code looks correct, Googlebot is seeing the canonical with a JSession ID.
   b.    Resubmit both URL’s in WMT Fetch feature hoping that Google recognizes the canonical.
          -    We did this, but given the canonical issue it won’t be effective until we can fix it.
   c.    URL handling change in WMT
          -    We made this change, but it didn’t seem to fix the problem
   d.    301 or No Index the version with the email tracking parameters
          -    This seems drastic and I’m concerned that we’d lose ranking on this very strategic keyword

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

Kevin

[kevin_reyes]

Hey jStrong,

Thanks for your response.

I was thinking along the same lines, but I'm TERRIFIED of losing rank for this keyword. Technically, you're correct. However, what Google actually does can sometimes be questionable.

I think we'll test this out on one of our lower volume and less strategic keywords and see how Google reacts.

I'll respond to this thread once we get results back.

Thanks again!

Kevin

[Whebb]

Hi Kevin,

I have seen URLs get picked up sometimes by google that are seemingly nowhere to be found. In this case I would setup the 301 redirect. The page being redirected to has the canonical so that tells google this is the correct page to index. The 301 also tells google that the current page being indexed is no longer valid and that it should update the SERP to display the correct page instead. There may be a chance you lose some ranking, but if the content is the same, I would think this is minimal as is stated in this Moz article about redirects and you could probably regain any lost ranking relatively quickly.

Hope this helps.