Dangers of Referral Tracking URLs

Referral tracking URLs are a fairly common practice. They are used to identify the source of a visitor – for example, if the customer clicked on an AdWords campaign. Tracking referrals in this way can help build useful data to evaluate the effectiveness of different types of marketing.

Here’s an example from a Just Flowers PPC ad:

http://www.justflowers.com/google_sponsored_flowers_exact/flowers.asp?g1=44657781&gclid=COiLsdLjkJcCFQZqswodWV6D-g&se=1

This URL combines different tracking methods:

• Links to a specific page: “/google_sponsored_flowers_exact/flowers.asp” which tells us that Just Flowers was using Exact Matching on the term “flowers”
• URL Parameters: “?g1=44657781&gclid=COiLsdLjkJcCFQZqswodWV6D-g&se=1” which tracks the actual AdWords campaign and ad

In general, tracking URLs can provide good data. Marketing has to be goals-driven, and this will tell us if the campaigns are meeting their goals by delivering traffic.

Where these URLs become a problem is when they lead to the creation of duplicate content. When Google sees duplicate content – pages with the same contents – they will pick one and ignore the rest. Different URLs are different pages, in Google’s mind, even if they point to the same contents.

An Example of Poor Use of Tracking URLs

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m picking on Flower Shop Network – this is just an example I came across the other day, and it prompted this post.

FSN uses tracking URLs to provide florists with data on how many customers clicked through from the FSN directory listing to the shop’s website. Flowers By Boragi is using a Teleflora template website, with a link from the FSN directory. As such, FSN links to this URL:

www.flowersbyboragi.com/?rfr=FSN&srccode=FlowerShopNetwork

You can see that FSN has included two URL parameters to indicate the customer came from FSN’s directory. the problem? Google has chosen this URL as the authoritative or “canonical” URL for their site. Look at this screen cap from the Google SERPs:

What does this mean?

Every time a user searches Google and clicks on this result, FSN gets the credit for the referral. As you can imagine, this makes their service appear to be way more valuable than it is. (Again, we’re not saying FSN isn’t useful … just that the stats are now severely skewed).

How to Avoid This

This problem occurred because Flowers By Boragi didn’t have enough useful links coming in to their proper URL, so the FSN link was deemed the most trustworthy. The main URL was discarded in favour of the tracking URL.

There are a few methods to avoid this problem.

• Have a separate page that accepts the URL with the tracking parameters, then redirects the user to the appropriate page
• Use anchors (#) instead of the traditional ? to define parameters. Google ignores the # anchor, as anchors refer to sections of the same page.

Both of these approaches require some work on the florist’s site, and possibly in their analytics setup. A simpler option is to have a landing page dedicated to FSN traffic that is not indexed by Google.

Of course, you could always just work on getting better links to your main URL so that Google understands that is the authoritative page … that’s the least technical approach, but one that still requires some work.

I wish I could say that this is the first example of its kind that I’ve seen, but it isn’t. Truth be told, every florist site we convert from a wire service or template provider has some duplicate content URLs indexed, due to poor internal linking and / or tracking URLs. This isn’t the biggest SEO issue for florists, but it’s certainly one that can be cleaned up.