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Hi mate - yes I am also seeing a percentage increase of returning visitors from around 20%-80%.

This is definitely related to the session parameter change. Although I find it hard to believe that it is a "bug". Rather, as you say, I think it is because they are now calculating the ended session differently.

This does make past and present comparisons slightly challenging

Cheers

Henry

Cheers Bryce!

Thanks for that tip mate.

If all the customers were to link oursitesname.com/login. Would Google be suspicious if we were showing different content (branded login pages with text) to different referrers? I mean before they are logged in.

Hi Ryan,

This is a very valid point and would be easy to do if the referrer was always coming directly from the customer site. The issue is that sometimes the customers (which are libraries) send their traffic over a 3^rd party referrer (so the user can input a library card number) and some libraries use the same 3^rd party referrer which makes things messy. This is the case about 40% of the time.

Any suggestions?

On a side note… How does Google treat the ? parameter in URLs (e.g. www.oursitesname.com/?customer-indentifier). Do these types of links carry the same link power as without the parameter?

Thanks for your help mate!

Henry

Thanks for the answer mate!

Hi There,

This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help!

The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform.

For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with.

Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields.

So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this?

Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL?

Thanks in advance!

Henry

Hi all,

When you set up campaign tracking in Google Analytics you get something like this "?variable=value parameters" in the URL.

If you place such a link on your site as an internal link, will it be considered as a different URL and will have its own link value?

The question I have is, since Google knows it's a Google link and knows the original URL (by stripping the tags), does it pass link value to the original URL? If not, what can be done to pass link value?

Thanks in advance.

Henry