Visitor Tracking help needed

[UltraZulu]

Hi

We have an internal tracking system which works as follows:

1. Visitor types in url, www.domain.com
2. www.domain.com redirects with a 302 to a central server and gets a unique visitor number
3. Central server produces unique visitor number and redirects with a 302 back to www.domain.com and appends the visitor number and the end of the url, www.domain.com?v=12345

There must be something wrong with this picture as we have hundreds of links pointing to us but we are not getting any pagerank for it. Nor are we ranking for our major keywords. Please can anyone advise as to the best solution to fixing this.

My initial thoughts are:

1. redirect 301 to central server
2. get unique number and redirect 301 back to url
3. hide visitor number in session variable

We use ASP.

Thanks in advance

[Chris_D]

Hi UltraZulu,

Welcome to the SEW forums!

Are you sure you ONLY add a 5 digit customer number to the url? i.e. there is no sessionID as well?

I ask because this confused me "hide visitor number in session variable".

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session ID's or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
http://www.google.com/intl/az/webmasters/guidelines.html

[UltraZulu]

Thanks Chris_D

Some of our visitor numbers have up to 10 numbers, i.e. 392245417

What I want to do is track it in a session variable, but not append the session variable in the url.

How will the 302 redirect effect my rankings and how will my linking be affected by having a visitor tracking number in the url?

Are there any other disadvantages of having the tracking number as a querystring in the url?