campaign tracking tags in URLs

[jerknob]

let's say you want to place a few ads around the web to site.com, so in order to track hits, you use the incoming url as site.com/index.html?campaign=1.

A. Will Google and other search engines see index.html and index.html?campaign=1 as 2 different pages?
-if so will google see these 2 pages as duplicate content and only index one of them?


B. Will backlinks pointing to index.html?campaign=1 be counted the same as backlinks pointing to index.html?


Background -- i had a similar situation pointing to my homepage and as soon as google came around and crawled the site containing our ad, every homepage listing became ?campaign=... In addition, it appeared that our SERPs dropped as a result. I quickly removed the tracking tag and 2 days later, google removed the tracking tag page from its index and each keyword our homepage hit on moved back up to its previous spot in the rankings.

Is this a normal occurance? Anyone experience something similar? What is the workaround?

[vayapues]

Jerknob,

Google and other search engines will view the campaign=1, and campaign=2 as two seperate pages with duplicate content.

Inbound links will not be credited to index.html, but instead to index.html?campagin=x

This is because many sites use vars in the URL as a means of managing dynamic websites. ie www.website.com/?page=t-rex and www.website.com/?page=jupiter would bring up two different pages.

[vayapues]

one work around would be to embed a cookie in the user's browser on the referring site with the var campaign=x and than check for the cookie on the your server when they arrive there.

[jerknob]

thanks for that info.

Now what if instead of using a question mark (?) in the url, i used a pound symbol (#). What effect would that have on google's indexing?

my goal is to have the tracking in the url (if possible) without sacrificing PR and without triggering google's duplicate content.

is "website.com/page.html#1" a feasible method? will google sees this link the same as "website.com/page.html" ?

The other thing i've seen mentioned is to use a colon... "website.com/page.html:1" How about this?

[farees]

Easiest way not to fall in the duplicate content trap is to use robots.txt file.
That is if you are only interested in tracking traffic coming from a specific "partner site" where you ad is listed and not the Google bot.

Put the page with duplicate content in folder and add all pages with duplicate content into this folder) and use "Disallow: /DupeContentFolder/" in the robots file.

- Farees

[jerknob]

my hope is to gain google PR through the advertisement links all pointed to one page (different tracking code) by having google "see" only 1 url. maybe i'm chasing white elefant?