Campaign tags are an important online tracking tool. You can create campaign tags by using campaign tracking in Google Analytics or utilizing a tag manager, such as Google Tag Manager. Webmasters utilize these tracking tools to get more in-depth analytical data. But, as we know, duplicate URLs are an issue for search engine optimization and that is exactly what these tagging systems do, they create duplicate URLs. This is because they append tracking code to the end of the URLs they are tracking. In this post, we will look at tagged URLs and Google search engine optimization, to make sure we are making the most of our SEO potential.
So how does Google deal with campaign tags on a URL? Matt Cutts from Google says that the crawl team does a great job of cononicalizing the tags, or choosing the right URL to rank in Google search. If you are using standard tracking, nothing to outside the norm, often times Google will be able to detect the correct URL.
How to be 100% Sure Google Interprets your Tagged URLs Correctly
Ignite Visibility has a large amount of experience with this particular situation. What we have seen that the best option is using rel=”canonical” to specify the correct URL. However, you can also set specific URL parameters in webmaster tools or even do a 301 redirect from the tracked URL to the correct URL. Again, we recommend the rel=”canonical” option.
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