"There’s a somewhat heated debate over at Sphinn and many other places as well where folks call each other guppy and dumbass try to figure out whether a particular directory’s click tracking sinks PageRank distribution or not. Besides interesting replies from Matt Cutts, an essential result of this debate is that Sphinn will implement a dumbass button."
5 Comments
5 Comments
Comments
Thanks for the sphinn Harith. :) It seems BC will change their click tracking method, so the discussion was worth something: http://sphinn.com/story/5310#c8138
It is nice to find a silver lining in a thundercloud. There is an epidemic of poor scripting on websites. Thank you Sebastian, for a clear concise analysis of a real-life example. There are practical reasons for best practices.
Maybe it’s worth mentioning that this article is not about heated debates at Sphinn, but discussing not so well known SEO pitfalls of click tracking.
It isn’t just click tracking that developers continually royally screw up. They fail so often to analyse the "type" and "format" of URLs they are presenting to search engines. In consequence, they also often manage to build in at least a dozen types of duplicate content issues on just about every sort of forum, blog, cart, CMS, and scripted site they produce.
You’re right. The problem is they just don’t think SEO. Once I’ve trained a crew of developers they can output clean stuff all of a sudden. Unfortunately most ventures popping up left and right every minute don’t bother thinking about future-proof architectures, not to speak of considering SEO advice upfront.