URL Formatting for Internal Link Tagging
-
After doing some research on internal campaign link tagging, I have seen conflicting viewpoints from analytics and SEO professionals regarding the most effective and SEO-friendly way to tag internal links for a large ecommerce site.
It seems there are several common methods of tagging internal links, which can alter how Google interprets these links and indexes the URLs these links point to.
- Query Parameter - Using ? or & to separate a parameter like cid that will be appended to all internal-pointing links. Since Google will crawl and index these, I believe this method has the potential of causing duplicate content.
- Hash - Using # to separate a parameter like cid that will be appended to all internal-pointing links.
- Javascript - Using an onclick event to pass tracking data to your analytics platform
- Not Tagging Internal Links - While this method will provide the cleanest possible internal link paths for Google and users navigating the site and prevent duplicate content issues, analytics will be less effective.
For those of you that manage SEO or analytics for large (1 million+ visits per month) ecommerce sites, what method do you employ and why?
Edit* - For this discussion, I am only concerned with tagging links within the site that point to other pages within the same site - not links that come from outside the site or lead offsite.
Thank you
-
Thanks for the answer. I will be using Ensighten to manage the link tagging, so any of the options I presented can be utilized.
Have you found any negative consequences associated with using the query parameter to tag internal links, such as duplicate pages indexed? Or does the Webmaster Tools setup and canonical tags eliminate the chance for this happening?
The query parameter is also used in the URL outside of tagging (for sorting, brand, and other refiners). Is it possible to specify that you want certain query parameter-appended URLs crawled and not others?
-
I manage a large traffic ecommerce website and use Google Tag Manager to tag all internal links for review in GA.
If you want to use a query parameter, which I also actively use, you can apply settings in Google Webmaster Tools to ignore them and not cause duplicate content issues.
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
-
Pinterest links have been growing in Webmaster Tools
I've been using Pinterest for a couple of years now. It has been great in promoting our brand and generating referral traffic. My question is this. I've noticed in Webmaster Tools, in the "Links to your site" section, that my links from Pinterest has really shot up.It's gone from 3,500 links, 6 months ago, to over 23,000 recently. Those of you using Pinterest, have you seen a similar increase? Just wondering if Google is recognizing more of the links, even though they are "no-follow" links.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Google Internal Search Tracking Kaput :-(
Buongiorno from cloudy & overcast Wetherby UK... On this site http://www.dartexcoatings.com/ I configured Google to tracdk internal search & heres how - http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/internal-search-jinx_zpscf86b49d.jpg But internal search data is not pulling through 😞 How can i fix this please.
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
Thanks,
David0 -
Is it possible to link two Analytics accounts to one AdWords account
Hi Is it possible to link two Analytics accounts that I have admin access to to the one AdWords account in my MCC. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | BeattieGroup0 -
Internal Links not Showing Up
Hi, I have a wordpress blog at www.learnbonds.com. I am looking through open site explorer and and showing only 9 internal links on my report. I have hundreds of internal links on the site so I am wondering why they are not showing up? Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks Dave
Reporting & Analytics | | fxtrader19790 -
Link Analysis Past 6 Months
I'm analyzing inbound links for a site and I was wondering if there is a way to see how many of the links were created in a certain time period? Example how many inbound links were sent to this sub domain during the past 6 months? I would think there would be a fairly simple way to do this, but not sure. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | seantgreen0 -
Why do I have few different index URL addresses?
Yes I know, sorry guys but I also have a problem with duplicate pages. It shows that almost every page of my site has a duplicate content issue and looking at my folders in the server, I don't see all these pages... This is a static Website with no shopping cart or anything fancy. The first on the list is my [index] page and this is giving me a hint about some sort of bad settings on my end with the SEOMOZ crawler??? Please advice and thank you! index-variations.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | cssyes0 -
Do links with tracking codes pass PageRank?
I have a client that has acquired a link from an influential partner but the partner has set the link up to have clicks tracked within their analytics. Do links like this pass PageRank: Anchor Text
Reporting & Analytics | | SearchEngineRescue0 -
Search within search? Weird google URLs
Good morning afternoon, how are you guys doing today? I'm experiencing a few Panda issues I'm trying to fix, and I was hoping I could get some help here about one of my problems. I used Google analytics to extract pages people land on after a Google search. I'm trying to identify thin pages that potentially harm my website as a whole. It turns out I have a bunch of pages in the likes of the following: /search?cd=15&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&source=www.google .co.uk, and so on for a bunch of countries (.fi, .com, .sg, .pk, and so on, maybe 50 of them) My question is: what are those pages? their stats are awful, usually 1 visitor, 100% bounce rate, and 0 links. Do you think they can explain my dramatic drop in traffic following Panda? If so, what should I do with them? NOINDEX? Deletion? What would you suggest? I also have a lot of links in the likes of the following: /google-search?cx=partner-pub-6553421918056260:armz8yts3ql&cof=FORID:10&ie=ISO-8859-1&sa=Search&siteurl=www.mysite.com/content/article They lead to custom search pages. What should I do with them? Almost two weeks ago, Dr. Pete posted an article untitled Fat Panda and Thin Content in which he deals with "search within search" and how they might be targeted by Panda. Do you think this is the issue I'm facing? Any suggestion/help would be much appreciated! Thanks a lot and have a great day 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Ericc220