Affiliate Link is Trumping Homepage - URL parameter handling?
-
An odd and slightly scary thing happened today: we saw an affiliate string version of our homepage ranking number one for our brand, along with the normal full set of site-links.
We have done the following:
1. Added this to our robots.txt :
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?2. Reinserted a canonical on the homepage (we had removed this when we implemented hreflang as had read the two interfered with each other. We haven't had canonical for a long time now without issue. Is this anything to do with the algo update perhaps?!
The third thing we're reviewing I'm slightly confused about: URL Parameter Handling in GWT. As advised - with regard to affiliate strings - to the question: "Does this parameter change page content seen by the user?" We have NO selected, which means they should be crawling one representative URL. But isn't it the case that we don't want them crawling or indexing ANY affiliate URLs? You can specify Googlebot to not crawl any of particular string, but only if you select: "Yes. The parameter changes the page content." Should they know an affiliate URL from the original and not index them? I read a quote from Matt Cutts which suggested this (along with putting a "nofollow" tag in affiliate links just in case)
Any advice in this area would be appreciated. Thanks.
-
I'm glad to hear you've been sorted out Lawrence Neal. I find it interesting the the other Lawrence saw something similar, and I'll ask around to see if it was a glitch that other people have noticed too.
For anyone reading this wondering what Mr. Neal was referring to in regard to rel canonical / href lang conflict, there's a good writeup of it over at Dejanseo.com and Gianluca Fiorelli mentions it in his comment on Dr. Pete's Rel Canonical uber post here on Moz.
-
Luckily it's disappeared today, which leads me to believe it was a Google-side algo error that was swiftly corrected (nothing we have done will have reflected in the serp so quickly, I doubt)
-
Lets say your site is using php?
Your system no doubt picks up the parameter with a php get and stores it as a session variable.
That is likely all that would need to be done before the page is 301 redirected.
Best thing to do is create a test page with the cod mentioned above on your site and try it
have the page redirect to the homepage and see if that affiliate code is stored.
-
I don't know if this has anything to do with the algo update, but at least your not the only one. I saw a competitor ranking with a second version of their homepage. The second version had utm parameters behind them.
Luckily the page with the utm parameters disappeared from the serps this morning. He was actually ranking first with the normal version and second with the version with the url parameters. This was on some pretty competitive keywords and lasted almost three days.
-
Thanks for your reply, Gary. I'm not entirely sure how our (far reaching and lucrative) affiliate tracking/logging works, but I would have thought 301ing all the links to the original page would sabotage it, no?!
The canonical will certainly work but we've only reinstated it on the homepage as we have 6 other sites that have hreflang alternates in place and the canonical seems to interfere with their function.
-
hmmm.. seems like Google is getting some strong linking signals that this is the popular page to arrive at.
The canonical tag on the homepage is the right way to go.
You could 301 redirect any customer that lands on you with an affiliate code in the url? This would be a very simple bit of code you could even put it in an an include at the top of each page. This way those pages never even exist and you get all the link juice.
One other thing might be to put a noindex on any page that has an affiliate parameter. But you would lose the link juice.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Trailing slash URLs and canonical links
Hi, I've seen a fair amount of topics speaking about the difference between domain names ending with or without trailing slashes, the impact on crawlers and how it behaves with canonical links.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
However, it sticks to domain names only.
What about subfolders and pages then? How does it behaves with those? Say I've a site structured like this:
https://www.domain.com
https://www.domain.com/page1 And for each of my pages, I've an automatic canonical link ending with a slash.
Eg. rel="canonical" href="https://www.domain.com/page1/" /> for the above page. SEM Rush flags this as a canonical error. But is it exactly?
Are all my canonical links wrong because of that slash? And as subsidiary question, both domain.com/page1 and domain.com/page1/ are accessible. Is it this a mistake or it doesn't make any difference (I've read that those are considered different pages)? Thanks!
G0 -
Unnatural links to your site--impacts links
Hi, I just recive a "nice" Massage at my WMT- Unnatural links to your site—impacts links _Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more._Did someone here came across any massage like this before?if so, any suggestion on what to so next?Whould love for some help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Should I make a new URL just so it can include a target keyword, then 301 redirect the old URL?
This is for an ecommerce site, and the company I'm working with has started selling a new line of products they want to promote.Should I make a new URL just so it can include a target keyword, then 301 redirect the old URL? One of my concerns is losing a little bit of link value from redirecting. Thank you for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
Help! Same page with multiple urls. How is this handled?
I'm using DotNetNuke for many of our sites. DotNetNuke's home page can have multiple VALID URLs that go to the same home page. Example: http://aviation-sms.com http://www.aviation-sms.com http://aviation-sms.com/default.aspx http://www.aviation-sms.com/default.aspx and http://aviation-sms.com/aviationSMS.aspx http://www.aviation-sms.com/aviationSMS.aspx All the above URLs have the same content. In the page header tag, I have: Should I be doing something else? such as removing the "default.aspx"??? I have a blog also that has a boatload of pages. I tried this canonical approach, but I'm not sure SEO Moz likes it and the tool offers me little guidance on this issue.
Technical SEO | | manintights280 -
Canonical Link Quesiton
I wrote an article that is a page article, but would also be a very good blog post - So my question is two things: 1. If i post it as a static page and syndicate it as a blog post and have it as a canonical link to the page, google will read see the blog and read the page _url as the one with credit correct? In turn not dinging me for duplicate content. 2. Given if the above statement is correct, should I write the blog and put it on my static page referencing the blog or the way i have it as a static page with the blog using a canonical reference back to the page. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
What happens when a link goes to a dead url on my site?
I noticed in Open Site Explorer, I have several incoming links going to dead urls because i re-organized my site. For example, there might be an incoming link to: sample.php?ID=8 The problem is that I moved the file to /subdir1 so it would be nice if it could link to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 BUT, on top of that, I have also changed the url to seo-friendly urls. So, really, it should link to /Category_Descripton/ProductName/8 and then get re-written to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 So, what are the implications of having these incoming links to dead urls other than the bad user experience. What are the implications from an SEO standpoint? What's the best way to fix this? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | webtarget0 -
How do I fix these duplicate URLs?
HI guys, I ran a report on my site and it shows some duplicate titles (example below). Do I need to add something to the htaccess file or another file to fix this? I understand that the search engines should only see 1 URL for the page. 2 pages have "Bikes for sale | used bikes | second hand bicycles" title pauslwebsite.com/bikes/ paulswebsite.com/bikes/index.asp Thanks
Technical SEO | | paulmund0 -
URL Length
What is the ideal length for an item's URL. Theirs a few different options. A) www.mydomain.com/item-name B) www.mydomain.com/category-name/product-name C) www.mydomain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name Please choose A, B, or C and explain why you made that decision. Looking forward to the responses.
Technical SEO | | Romancing0