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Yes, any URL that has over 50,000 URL's should have a sitemap_index, within that xml sitemap index should have listed the other category specific URL sitemaps. These are best organized in the hierarchy of the website structure to reinforce your schematic URL structure.

Multi-faceted navigation is tricky as it duplicates ( as it's intended).  Reviewing the traffic and using the parameter handling tools within search console is a great way to see how Google is 'seeing' these URLs. I wouldn't recommend blocking them in the robots.txt if you do, these will still be indexed because they are linked to other URL's and Google will stumble upon them.

Thank you Eric.  It's definitely a gray area, I had considered your suggestion about requesting the author change the source parameter to something other than affiliate- and that's a great idea too.

I welcome more dialogue on this from others who may have some input.

Occasionally some of our clients receive editorial mentions and links in which the author adds utm parameters to the outbound links on their blog. The links are always natural, never compensated, and followed.  However, they are sometimes listed as utm_source=affiliate even thought we have no existing affiliate relationship with the author.  My practice has been to ask the author to add a rel="norewrite" attribute to the link to remove any trace of the word affiliate.

I have read that utm parameters do not affect link juice transfer, however, given the inaccurate "affiliate" source, I wouldn't want Google to misunderstand and think that we are compensating people for followed editorial links.

Should I continue following this practice, or is it fine to leave these links as they are?

Thanks!

This is a great thread. I have been wondering the same. We frequently see situations in which a blog links to one of our clients within a post using a custom utm URL, often citing the utm_source=affiliate even though we don't have an affiliate relationship nor have we paid for these links.

We have been requesting that the author add a rel="norewrite" attribute to the link to block the utm from affecting the link. I've been wondering if this was necessary, or if the utm link is still passing juice to our target page (especially when the source is inacuurately labeled as affiliate)

should we continue requesting the norewrite attribute?

Hi Holger,

Duplicate content is typically qualified as identical, or similar, content across multiple pages (within a single domain or across other domains)--not duplication within a single page. The idea is that you're potentially spamming the search index with multiple results lacking contextual distinction.

Your particular case, however, puts your page's quality score at risk by extending the length of your page's content without added context or value (the repetition is more like keyword stuffing, if anything.) Rather than managing two identical DIV blocks, you should manipulate the positioning, sizing, styling, etc. of a single DIV block within each respective media query selector in your CSS.

Here's a helpful tutorial with examples: http://bit.ly/ncY2HY

Hi Danny,

Ahrefs (www.ahrefs.com) offers a nice filtering mechanism for excluding target pages during a backlink profile analysis--it's called Baskets. Once you've entered in a root domain (make sure you have .domain/ selected to capture every page), click into the "Top Pages" tab. Within Top Pages, you can 'add all links to basket' by clicking the basket icon w/ green arrow in the header of the 3rd column.

Once you've built your basket, you can hop into the basket management area (basket icon in the top right of the page) and quickly remove the few root level pages from the top of the list. Once removed, you'll be working with an exclusive set of sub-page targets for further reporting and analysis.

Multi-faceted navigation is tricky as it duplicates ( as it's intended).  Reviewing the traffic and using the parameter handling tools within search console is a great way to see how Google is 'seeing' these URLs. I wouldn't recommend blocking them in the robots.txt if you do, these will still be indexed because they are linked to other URL's and Google will stumble upon them.

Yes, any URL that has over 50,000 URL's should have a sitemap_index, within that xml sitemap index should have listed the other category specific URL sitemaps. These are best organized in the hierarchy of the website structure to reinforce your schematic URL structure.