A common mistake made by companies just starting out is assigning more than one URL to a single page. For example, let’s say you had http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html
Now, whichever URL you might put into your browser, the same page will be loaded. Not a problem, right? The visitor is still going to see the same information, so it’s not something I should worry about… right?
Wrong. The above example is a classic example of substandard SEO. The problem comes when one considers that, from the Search Engine’s perspective, they are indexing two separate URLs, and are in fact creating two different version of the page. There are a number of problems that arise because of this, but the end result can best be explained by: Rather have one, good, solid page, than two weak, substandard pages. Because, ultimately, that is what is happening here. You are diluting the “power” of your one page, and “splitting it up” to share over two pages. Quite apart from the ranking issues of diluting a pages “power” and its “link juice”, the practise of two different URLs for a single page also opens a whole new area of “duplicate content” (which we’ll expand on in a later post).
So… to sum up: two URLs for one page? Bad. One URL per page. Remember this.
The reason that we’ve rambled on here about this issue is to introduce you to another topic: that of URL Referrer Tracking. Nate Buggia over at Jane and Robot has just written a fantastic post regarding URL referrer tracking, and how to deal with the issues it can cause; namely, having more than one URL per page.
While it might be somewhat technical for most small website owners, it really should be required reading for those hoping to optimise their site to an optimal SEO standard.
There may be instance when you want to track the source of a request, and a common way of doing so is by using tracking parameters in URLs. Unfortunately, implementing referrer tracking in this way can result in significant issues with search engines. In particular, it can cause duplicate content issues (since the search engine bot finds multiple valid URLs that point to the same page) and ranking issues (since all the links to the page aren’t to the same URL).
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Unfortunately there is no perfect solution for this scenario, and what works best for you depends on your infrastructure and situation. Here we’ve listed several common solutions that you can choose from to improve your own implementation.
Read the entire article here: URL Referrer Tracking
You won’t regret it.
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If you’d like to chat to the Elite SEO - SEO Brisbane agency regarding anything that’s been mentioned in today’s post, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
