4 Questions On Handling Marketing Urls

[thwart]

4 Questions On Handling Marketing Urls, looking for some opinions, best practices

we have marketing urls (with additional parameters) through cse's and affiliate channels that are 302'ing back to our canonical pages. clearly we aren't receiving page rank with the 302; otherwise we feel that we're doing what we can to avoid dupe content issues.

However, was hoping for some opinions or validation (I may not be fluent in high tech speak though):

1) short of a 301 redirect solution, and storing referring data in cookies or a database, is the 302 solution enough to solve a dupe content issue? but what if someone would copy and paste a marketing url and put it on their site? it still 302's to our site, but is there a chance that that URL could be indexed on its own? if so, how much of a chance?

2) what do you consider the value to be for the missed page rank? CSE's strike me as being very thin, but some affiliates could post on relevant blogs. That to me would seem like an amount to be interested in.

3) is there any threat in paid search links?

4) it's my understanding that google will often trim long parameter URLs to other dupe (but shorter) URLs. If so, how often do they do it? Do they compare it against canonical URLs in the sitemap?

Thanks - hopefully all these make sense. Looking forward to your answer.

[AussieWebmaster]

a 302 and a 301 both do the same thing with tracking information etc. so using one over the other seems moot

there should be no difference in passed PR - links etc get passed and page gets reassessed even temporarily - copy and paste code will not 302 as the 302 and 301 are done in the htaccess page - a refresh redirect is another story

no threat to paid - content of page is content and will score your QS as such

how long are these parameters??? short is not just chosen over longer every time

[thwart]

Are you saying that a 302 redirect is the same as a 301 redirect regarding passing PR?

copy and paste code will not 302 as the 302 and 301 are done in the htaccess page

If a webmaster copies a referral URL from one site (not our site) and pastes it on another site (also not our site), why wouldn't the 302 work exactly?

how long are these parameters??? short is not just chosen over longer every time

Are you suggesting then that there IS some kind of URL trimming going on by Google? How about Yahoo and MSN? How often is it done and what triggers it?

[beu]

If implemented properly 301s will pass PageRank and other related signals within a few weeks at most. On the other hand, 302s do not pass PageRank. Either way, when a page in one domain uses a 301 or 302 to redirect to a page in another domain, in most cases search engines record the "target" URL.

Search engines have issues with URLs containing more than 3 parameters. I would avoid URLs with more than one domain name redirecting to another site. (hope that makes sense)

[AussieWebmaster]

urls that contain more than 3 urls??? you mean urls with more than 3 other urls redirected to it?

That one I have not experienced.

[beu]

Originally Posted by AussieWebmaster

urls that contain more than 3 urls??? you mean urls with more than 3 other urls redirected to it?

That one I have not experienced.

Thanks, no I was meaning parameters in general.

[AussieWebmaster]

they do get a hard time but not excluded by variable numbers