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Avatar Posted By: frodo 277 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.zencartoptimization.com)
Category: Google Other
Learn how a fatal flaw in Google Analytic's Site Overlay reporting can be overcome using this clever trick.
2 Comments     

Comments

from g1smd 276 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Whoa, hold on a minute there.


You MUST make sure that none of those "special" URLs can ever get indexed by search engines, otherwise you will end up with a lot of problems.

One of those is that you are creating the mother of all "Duplicate Content" issues for your site... and there are already enough of those built in to packages like osCommence and ZenCart as supplied right out of the box, without creating any more.

The other is simply that your analytics will need to be filtered. You will need to only include hits where the referrer is your own site, otherwise you'll be looking not at people that clicked the respective link on your site, but at people that actually came in from the SERPs.

You're best off making sure that those extended URLs can never be indexed by any search engines.  There is also the other issue that you will be wasting PageRank within your site, and that has repercussions as to which pages of the site get dropped into the Supplemental Index.

You really don't want to mess with that stuff.

from frodo 276 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
+ -

This is a great point that has been brought up.

Although none of the "location links" I have personally used on sites (over a year now) have been indexed, it is possible that one day they could I would guess.

Here is the solution to both the Page Rank issue and the Duplicate content issue.

1) To keep Page Rank intact and NOT pass it to other pages use the "nofollow" tag in your tag as such: rel="nofollow". This is a technique that blogs have been using on comments for quite some time now. The concept was designed back in 2005 by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shelle.

More information the nofollow tag can be found at the following links:
Google Webmaster Guide

Wikipedia information on nofollow

Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links

2) For the duplicate content issue, you could use a robots.txt file to block the pages you do not want to get indexed.

Here is a link to an article about that technique.
Search Illustrated: Blocking Search Engines With Robots.txt

And another. This one from Google.

How do I use robots.txt to block access to my site?

I have read through research (and it says this on the Wikipedia article linked to above) that Google may follow a link with the "nofollow" attribute, however, it will NOT index it (preventing duplicate content).


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