Help! Duplicate content problems - How can I avoid this problem???

[slemps81]

Hi There,

On my site we have recently started a new campaign offer. We use Webtrends analytics to track on our site.

We have various banners across our site that link to this offer but we do not want it anywhere on our main navigation.

The problem is this:

The banners are the only way to access the offer page and they are individually tagged for webtrends (ie. he url is modified to www.domainname/offerpage?WT="individual banner id"). Google has visited our site and has accessed the offer page via a banner. The full url including the webtrends parameter is now listed in the organic results.

So every time the result is clicked, webtrends will record 1 natural search on the appropriate keyword but also one hit on the banner that it originally accessed the site from. Bad MI obviously.

We can work around this although it's not ideal. The bigger problem is that there are multiple banners with different webtrends parameters.

Will Google follow the other banner links to the offer page and then apply a dulicate content penalty??? What kind of impact could this have?

Any help/advice would be much appreciated!!

Thanks in advance,

Sam.

[JohnW]

>Will Google follow the other banner links to the offer page and then apply a dulicate content penalty

Yep, this page will get indexed multiple times, each time it will be listed under a different URI. Eventually most, if not all, versions of the page will get nuked for being duplicates.

IMO you should never allow any URI to load with a query string, ever. This should be handled on the server with a rewrite. I’m not a webtrends user, but I assume it would work out like you want it to.

If you can’t do this, then you could consider using robots.txt. Something like this could work:

User-agent: * (or User-Agent: Googlebot)
Disallow: /*?*

*Caution* If you have dynamic URIs on your site this will stop ALL of them from getting indexed.

[Kology]

First off the obvious. Do you want the offer page showing up in Google or any other search engine if the first place? If not, then use your robots.txt file to exclude this page from the index.

I'll assume you are using the "WT.mc_id=" parameter and populating it with a unique ID for each of the banner ads. There are a couple of work around depending on what data you want to extract using WebTrends.

1. Since these are on-site banners (ads on your own site), configure the on-site ad report instead of the marketing campaign reports. This requires no parameters instead you need to program WebTrends with the banner graphicalical file name and path and the destination URL. This will report will give you the number of ad impressions and the click-through rate.

2. It you are using the campaign drill down report, and tracking clicks to conversion, then what you need to do is set the parameter value dynamically based on the browser type. For example if browser equals, IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera then set parameter at X else set it as Y.

The benefit of this option is that you'll get to see and be able to track conversions from people find in the offer page via the search engines.

3. Start using WebTrends SDC and set the parameter dynamically as a meta tag. This way, the page URL will same regardless of which banner was clicked on, and the offer page will only appear once in the search engines. Of course, you'll still have an ad campaign parameter being recorded, so I'd suggest setting these meta tags dynamically as in point 2. As well in my opinion, since these are WebTrends SDC specific meta tags, the search engines will ignore them and not think you are trying to trick them.

[beu]

You might also setup a Google Webmaster Tools account and check for sites linking to the "bad" URLs. Might be good to do before you implement the robots. Then perhaps notify any sites linking to the URLs you wish to block. Just a thought!