I am using ClickTracks to analyze traffic on my website and because from the home page I have 2 links to a particular page, I needed to differentiate people landing on "page 2" from the home page - who clicked on the navbar vs who clicked on the text link for example.

So on the navbar, if an item pointed to page2.php, I modified it to be page2.php?source=navbar. I of course then have a link to page2.php?source=inline --> this would appear to be duplicate content.

Is there a way that I can track landings on a page from the home page without a search engine considering it duplicate content?

My reasoning for thinking that Google considers it duplicate content is that the page in question (page2.php) is no longer indexed...

Help! :-)

Is there a way that I can track landings on a page from the home page without a search engine considering it duplicate content?
Hello seomontreal. I had a similar problem, which I solved by linking to an anchor:

<a href="venues.html#iowa">Iowa Venues</a>
...
<a href="venues.html#illinois">Illinois Venues</a>

You can have both anchors at the top of the page, so they are functionally the same. HTH.

- Mike T.

It is never a good idea to have multiple URLs go to the same content pages - no matter what format used. By doing so you risk having duplicate content indexed and you "clutter" the site architecture. This can hurt both indexing and ranking.

Many sites use JavaScript on click events to track clicks (including some of the engines) and it seems to work more transparent to the user and with no problems for search engines (they basically just don't fire the onclick event)