Backlinks to unique login pages
-
Hi There,
This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help!
The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform.
For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with.
Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields.
So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this?
Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL?
Thanks in advance!
Henry
-
Cheers Bryce!
-
I don't think that should be an issue. The only time it would really be a problem is if you were doing "sniffing" for google bot and then displaying something different all-together.
The canonical tag isn't a bad idea either.
-
Thanks for that tip mate.
If all the customers were to link oursitesname.com/login. Would Google be suspicious if we were showing different content (branded login pages with text) to different referrers? I mean before they are logged in.
-
You have a measure of control over how Google treats parameters.
Log into Google Webmaster Tools > Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling tab. You can then add or modify any parameter and tell Google how they should react (i.e. ignore, dont ignore, let Google decide, or use a specific value).
Bing has a similar process.
-
Hi Ryan,
This is a very valid point and would be easy to do if the referrer was always coming directly from the customer site. The issue is that sometimes the customers (which are libraries) send their traffic over a 3<sup>rd</sup> party referrer (so the user can input a library card number) and some libraries use the same 3<sup>rd</sup> party referrer which makes things messy. This is the case about 40% of the time.
Any suggestions?
On a side note… How does Google treat the ? parameter in URLs (e.g. www.oursitesname.com/?customer-indentifier). Do these types of links carry the same link power as without the parameter?
Thanks for your help mate!
Henry
-
Hi Henry.
My primary question to you is regarding the approach you are taking. Why create a unique page for each customer?
It is a common practice among websites to offer login screens for users, and to customize pages based on cookies or login information. This can be accomplished without providing new pages on your site with unique URLs, but rather by allowing users to customize their page.
When I open my browser and go to Google.com, I am automatically logged in and I see my current background image of a lion. The page URL is shown as google.com and it is customized for me. This example is rather simple, but you can display current information relevant to your customer in the same manner.
I would suggest speaking to your website developer about making your site more dynamic in this regard. You will receive not only SEO benefits, but your site should become easier to maintain as well. If you do take this approach, be sure to work with your customers to update their current links, and to properly 301 your pages.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Old Content Pages
Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.
Technical SEO | | dueces0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
Redirecting root domain to a page based on user login
We have our main URL redirecting non-logged in users to a specific page and logged in users are directed to their dashboard when going to the main URL. We find this to be the most user-friendly, however, this is all being picked up as a 302 redirect. I am trying to advise on the ideal way to accomplish this, but I am not having much luck in my search for information. I believe we are going to put a true homepage at the root domain and simply redirect logged in users as usual when they hit the URL, but I'm still concerned this will cause issues with Google and other search engines. Anyone have experience with domains that need to work in this manner? Thank you! Anna
Technical SEO | | annalytical0 -
Banned Page
I have been using a 3rd party checker on indexed pages in google. It has shown several banned pages. I type the page in and it comes up. But it is nowhere to be found for me to delete it. It is not in the wordpress pages. It also shows up in the duplicate content section in my campaigns in moz.com. I can find the page to delete it. If it is banned then I do not want to redirect it to the correct page. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Roots70 -
404 error due to a page which requires a login
what do I do with 404 errors reported in webmaster tools that are actually URLs where users are clicking a link that requires them to log in (so they get sent to a login page). what's the best practice in these cases? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | joshuakrafchin0 -
How to improve my google backlinks
Hi i have just checked my google back links for my site www.in2town.co.uk and it has said that i have only five, not sure where these are from as the tool i was using did not tell me. But i have looked at my compeditors and they have a few hundred and some have thousands so i am just wondering what i need to do to compete and get more backlinks. I have been writing articles for other sites, free article sites hoping to get some traffic as well as backlinks, for this has not worked out. i just done a report now and i have got the following information DMOZ Directory ? NoYahoo Directory ? NoDigg 0 Yahoo Indexed Pages ? 0 Bing Indexed Pages 0 I would really like to know what steps i need to take as i feel that i have done a lot of good work but my back links are not improving. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does this page crawl well?
I just put up a page that uses an image map to illustrate a national currency note. http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/NationalCurrency/National-Bank-Note-Information.aspx My goal with this page is get results for National Bank Note. But I know image maps are wierd creatures and not good for linking. My question is, will Google index my tooltips and find this page useful and therefore worthy? I think the content is useful for my users but I just don't know if the implementation will work well. This screen will eventually have 5 or 6 notes on it and I don't want to do it the concensus is negative... Thanks for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Removing pages from website
Hello all, I am fairly new to the SEOmoz community. But i am working for a company which organizes exhibitons, events and training in Holland. A lot of these events are only given ones ore twice and then we do not organise them any more because they are no longer relevant. Every event has its own few webpages which provide information about the event and are being indexed by Google. In the past we did not remove any of these events. I was looking in the CMS and saw a lot of events of 2008 and older which are being indexed. To clean the website and the CMS i am thinking of removing these pages of old events. The risk is that these pages have some links to them and are getting some traffic, so if i remove them there is a risk of losing traffic and rankings. What would be the wise thing to do? Make a folder with archive or something? Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0