Backlinks to unique login pages
-
Hi There,
This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help!
The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform.
For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with.
Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields.
So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this?
Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL?
Thanks in advance!
Henry
-
Cheers Bryce!
-
I don't think that should be an issue. The only time it would really be a problem is if you were doing "sniffing" for google bot and then displaying something different all-together.
The canonical tag isn't a bad idea either.
-
Thanks for that tip mate.
If all the customers were to link oursitesname.com/login. Would Google be suspicious if we were showing different content (branded login pages with text) to different referrers? I mean before they are logged in.
-
You have a measure of control over how Google treats parameters.
Log into Google Webmaster Tools > Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling tab. You can then add or modify any parameter and tell Google how they should react (i.e. ignore, dont ignore, let Google decide, or use a specific value).
Bing has a similar process.
-
Hi Ryan,
This is a very valid point and would be easy to do if the referrer was always coming directly from the customer site. The issue is that sometimes the customers (which are libraries) send their traffic over a 3<sup>rd</sup> party referrer (so the user can input a library card number) and some libraries use the same 3<sup>rd</sup> party referrer which makes things messy. This is the case about 40% of the time.
Any suggestions?
On a side note… How does Google treat the ? parameter in URLs (e.g. www.oursitesname.com/?customer-indentifier). Do these types of links carry the same link power as without the parameter?
Thanks for your help mate!
Henry
-
Hi Henry.
My primary question to you is regarding the approach you are taking. Why create a unique page for each customer?
It is a common practice among websites to offer login screens for users, and to customize pages based on cookies or login information. This can be accomplished without providing new pages on your site with unique URLs, but rather by allowing users to customize their page.
When I open my browser and go to Google.com, I am automatically logged in and I see my current background image of a lion. The page URL is shown as google.com and it is customized for me. This example is rather simple, but you can display current information relevant to your customer in the same manner.
I would suggest speaking to your website developer about making your site more dynamic in this regard. You will receive not only SEO benefits, but your site should become easier to maintain as well. If you do take this approach, be sure to work with your customers to update their current links, and to properly 301 your pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Customer Reviews on Product Page / Pagination / Crawl 3 review pages only
Hi experts, I present customer feedback, reviews basically, on my website for the products that are sold. And with this comes the ability to read reviews and obviously with pagination to display the available reviews. Now I want users to be able to flick through and read the reviews to help them satisfy whatever curiosity they have. My only thinking is that the page that contains the reviews, with each click of the pagination will present roughly the same content. The only thing that changes is the title tags which will contain the number in the H1 to display the page number. I'm thinking this could be duplication but i have yet to be notified by Google in my Search console... Should i block crawlers from crawling beyond page 3 of reviews? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk0 -
[Organization schema] Which Facebook page should be put in "sameAs" if our organization has separate Facebook pages for different countries?
We operate in several countries and have this kind of domain structure:
Technical SEO | | Telsenome
example.com/us
example.com/gb
example.com/au For our schemas we've planned to add an Organization schema on our top domain, and let all pages point to it. This introduces a problem and that is that we have a separate Facebook page for every country. Should we put one Facebook page in the "sameAs" array? Or all of our Facebook pages? Or should we skip it altogether? Only one Facebook page:
{
"@type": "Organization",
"@id": "https://example.com/org/#organization",
"name": "Org name",
"url": "https://example.com/org/",
"sameAs": [
"https://www.linkedin.com/company/xxx",
"https://www.facebook.com/xxx_us"
], All Facebook pages:
{
"@type": "Organization",
"@id": "https://example.com/org/#organization",
"name": "Org name",
"url": "https://example.com/org/",
"sameAs": [
"https://www.linkedin.com/company/xxx",
"https://www.facebook.com/xxx_us"
"https://www.facebook.com/xxx_gb"
"https://www.facebook.com/xxx_au"
], Bonus question: This reasoning springs from the thought that we only should have one Organization schema? Or can we have a multiple sub organizations?0 -
Why are my Duplicated Pages not being updated?
I've recently changed a bunch of duplicated pages from our site. I did get a slightly minimized amount of duplicated pages, however, some of the pages that I've already fixed are still unfixed according to MOZ. Whenever I check the back-end of each of these pages, I see that they've already been changed and non of them are the same in terms of Meta Tag Title is concern. Can anyone provide any suggestions on what I should do to get a more accurate result? Is there a process that I'm missing?
Technical SEO | | ckroaster0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Duplicates on the page
Hello SEOMOZ, I've one big question about one project. We have a page http://eb5info.com/eb5-attorneys and a lot of other similar pages. And we got a big list of errors, warnings saying that we have duplicate pages. But in real not all of them are same, they have small differences. For example - you select "State" in the left sidebar and you see a list on the right. List on the right panel is changing depending on the what you selecting on the left. But on report pages marked as duplicates. Maybe you can give some advices how to improve quality of the pages and make SEO better? Thanks Igor
Technical SEO | | usadvisors0 -
I know I'm missing pages with my page level 301 re-directs. What can I do?
I am implementing page level re-directs for a large site but I know that I will inevitably miss some pages. Is there an additional safety net root level re-direct that I can use to catch these pages and send them to the homepage?
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Index page
To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com. All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content. Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website. Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ... Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem. For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously) I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content) To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website. This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years. As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ? Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ? Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status Many thanks in advance John
Technical SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
No-follow links on advertising pages
Hi I run a job board that enables employers to post job vacancies and information about their organisations. These are 'paid for' pages (advertising) on our site. These link out to their own websites. My question is, would it be better for these links out to their sites to be no-follow? From my site's perspective, I cannot necessarily dictate the quality of their websites (although the majority are leading firms) as I would in article and feature content, where we do happily link out and refer to other quality sites with information that gives readers further information. I know that many large job boards do this where they run listings of feeds from other sites, but should we also do this at the page level where the link out is effectively paid for. What would be the pros and cons if I do or if I don't use no-follow? I hope this makes sense and look forward to some replies. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CelestialChook0