Update - Google has crawled this correctly and is returning the correct, redirected page.  Meaning, it seems to have understood that we don't want any of the parametered versions indexed ("return representative link") from our original page and all of its campaign-tracked brethren, and is then redirecting from the representative link correctly.

And finally there was peace in the universe...for now.  ;>  Tim

Agree...it feels like leaving a bit to chance, but I'll keep an eye on it over the next few weeks to see what comes of it.  We seem to be re-indexed every couple of days, so maybe I can test it out Monday.

BTW, this issue really came up when we were creating a server side 301 redirect for the root URL, and then I got to wondering if we'd need to set up an irule for all parameters. Hopefully not...hopefully Google will figure it out for us.

Thanks Peter.  Tim

This question deals with dynamically created pages, it seems, and Google seems to recommend NOT choosing the "no" option in WMT - choose "yes" when you edit the parameter settings for this and you'll see an option for your case, I think, Christian (I know this is 3 years late, but still).

BUT I have a situation where we use SiteCatalyst to create numerous tracking codes as parameters to a URL.  Since there is not a new page being created, we are following Google's advice to select "no" - apparently will:

"group the duplicate URLs into one cluster and select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL."

What worries me is that a) the "root" URL will not be returned, somehow (perhaps due to freakish amount of inbound linking to one of our parametered URLs), and b) the root URL will not be getting the juice. The reason we got suspicious about this problem in the first place was that Google was returning one of our parametered URLs (PA=45) instead of the "root" URL (PA=58).

This may be an anomaly that will be sorted out now that we changed the parameter setting from "Let Google Decide" to "No, page does not change" i.e. return the "Representative" link, but would love your thoughts - esp on the juice passage.

Tim

Any word now?  I'm desperate to share one of the videos with my boss - in part to show her the value of the conference (hint hint!).  Is there even a partial list of completed videos?