I'm wondering what people recommend for linking from press releases; specifically, what kind of tracking parameters people add to their links, if any.

My first thought is to add UTM tracking parameters for Google Analytics, but I have a few concerns:

• bloggers that copy our link from the release include the tracking parameters in the links from their site, which would only identify the traffic as coming from the release and not the specific sites
• UTM parameters in the link may make it look less natural to Google

Also, I've considered using shortened URL's without parameters in the release that get 301 redirected to the relevant pages, which I thought might have a few benefits:

• the links look more natural (no tracking parameters)
• UTM parameters could be added as part of the redirect after the fact
• if the release attracted links from spammy sources for some reason I could kill the redirect, which I'm hoping would effectively kill the link

My company doesn't rely on press releases for link building, which we understand to have been ineffective for a long time, but we do send them out occasionally and want the most effective links for tracking and SEO.

I'd love to hear if anyone has thoughts on these assumptions, or if anyone has different linking strategies that they have found strike the right balance of SEO and tracking considerations. Thanks!

Hi John,

I feel like over the years more and more of my traffic is incorrectly showing up in Google Analytics with a "direct" source and have confirmed that is the case with some of my referral traffic, so I've been using UTM codes more often to correctly credit referrers in my reports.

Ideally the only UTM parameter I'd use would be the "Campaign" parameter so I could easily see aggregate statistics about traffic generated by the press release in GA regardless of source. However, I believe you're required to include source and medium parameters when using UTM codes, which is what makes all traffic look like it's coming from the same place when the link is copied to other sites. If I could just set a campaign parameter and let Google fill in the blanks for source and medium that would be great. Does anyone know if that works?

Alternatively I'm considering creating new pages on my site that are duplicates of existing pages with appropriate canonical links and linking to the new pages in my release. I was inspired by the concept of "canonical burn pages" that I first heard in this Whiteboard Friday.
https://moz.com/blog/risk-averse-link-building-whiteboard-friday

This method would address quite a few of my concerns:

• links look natural
• traffic from any source that ends up using this unique URL will be inherently aggregated when viewing reports for that URL
• Google should report accurate "source" data
• can kill the page if I end up with a lot of spammy inbound links

The only downside I can see is that we'll have to maintain duplicate pages, but I suppose we could put a 301 redirect on the URL at some point down the road and abandon the duplicate.

This strategy is still a work in progress so I'd still love to hear anyone else's thoughts about the best ways to link from press releases.