Danger in using utm_source and utm_medium to track tens of thousands of cross domain redirects
-
We just merged with another company and are redirecting their domains (competitive/similar content) to our own.
We'll have several domains, redirecting (301) several hundred thousand URL's to our domain (not all the same page, very unique mappings). Will adding utm_source, et al parameters to the URL's have a negative impact on how google transfers value to the pages based on the redirect authority passed?
Any points of view? We have a self referencing canonical, but given that we have 90 million pages on the current domain (and climbing), seems like cleanest approach would be to not use redirects.
Thanks,
Jeff
-
Absolutely Jeffrey. It is just an identifier so should be no issues with this at all. I have a large client who have done a very similar thing and 18 months on, SERP positions are still in the top 2
-Andy
-
Yeah it's an odd market
Cool - just wanted to solicit an opinion or two. So to be clear, redirecting to somesite.com/search/cows
is the same to google as redirecting to
-
You are fortunate to be in one of the few market areas where you can actually do this with with a good degree of success and not have to handle it all manually Jeffrey!
So that aside, I can't see issues with what you are planning, but as above, do remember that some link juice loss will happen with any 301.
-Andy
-
Right on Andy,
So you're calling into question volume of redirects? Well, we are basically redirecting a unique item to another unique item. In this case we're dealing with stock photography and media, so there are TONS of items and category pages that have relevant identical pages between domains.
The redirect mapping has been set-up very carefully using both manual and automated checks.
-
I can't help but feel unsure about redirecting so many pages Jeffrey, utm_source or not. With so many URL's, has the mapping process been handled manually, or at least have an intelligent algorithm to handle this?
Google are very clear on their thoughts of 301's, as I am sure you are aware, so get this wrong too many times and you will see a drop in the SERPs. Also, it is worth remembering that you lose some link power with a 301 anyway.
But to answer your question, I have never come across any time where tracking code has caused SEO issues.
-Andy
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
-
Temporary Domain Changes
Hi All, Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward. My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dapacifi0 -
Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs?
Hello. My question is:** Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs and a gTLD - and the gTLD is much more authoritative to begin with? ** I appreciate this is a very nuanced subject so below is a detailed explanation of my current approach, problem, and proposed solutions I am considering testing. Thanks for the taking the time to read this far! The Current setup Multiple ccTLD such as mysite.com (US), mysite.fr (FR), mysite.de (DE). Each TLD can have multiple languages - indeed each site has content in English as well as the native language. So mysite.fr (defaults to french) and mysite.fr/en-fr is the same page but in English. Mysite.com is an older and more established domain with existing organic traffic. Each language variant of each domain has a sitemap that is individually submitted to Google Search Console and is linked from the of each page. So: mysite.fr/a-propos (about us) links to mysite.com/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in French. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc) mysite.fr/en-fr/about-us links to mysite.com/en-fr/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in English. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc). There is more English content on the site as a whole so the English version of the sitemap is always bigger at the moment. Every page on every site has two lists of links in the footer. The first list is of links to every other ccTLD available so a user can easily switch between the French site and the German site if they should want to. Where possible this links directly to the corresponding piece of content on the alternative ccTLD, where it isn’t possible it just links to the homepage. The second list of links is essentially just links to the same piece of content in the other languages available on that domain. Mysite.com has its international targeting in Google Search console set to the US. The problems The biggest problem is that we didn’t consider properly how we would need to start from scratch with each new ccTLD so although each domain has a reasonable amount of content they only receive a tiny proportion of the traffic that mysite.com achieves. Presumably this is because of a standing start with regards to domain authority. The second problem is that, despite hreflang, mysite.com still outranks the other ccTLDs for brand name keywords. I guess this is understandable given the mismatch of DA. This is based on looking at search results via the Google AdWords Ad Preview tool and changing language, location, and domain. Solutions So the first solution is probably the most obvious and that is to move all the ccTLDs into a subfolder structure on the mysite.com site structure and 301 all the old ccTLD links. This isn’t really an ideal solution for a number of reasons, so I’m trying to explore some alternative possible routes to explore that might help the situation. The first thing that came to mind was to use cross-domain canonicals: Essentially this would be creating locale specific subfolders on mysite.com and duplicating the ccTLD sites in there, but using a cross-domain canonical to tell Google to index the ccTLD url instead of the locale-subfolder url. For example: mysite.com/fr-fr has a canonical of mysite.fr
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatello
mysite.com/fr-fr/a-propos has a canonical of mysite.fr/a-propos Then I would change the links in the mysite.com footer so that they wouldn’t point at the ccTLD URL but at the sub-folder URL so that Google would crawl the content on the stronger domain before indexing the ccTLD domain version of the URL. Is this worth exploring with a test, or am I mad for even considering it? The alternative that came to my mind was to do essentially the same thing but use a 301 to redirect from mysite.com/fr-fr to mysite.fr. My question is around whether either of these suggestions might be worth testing, or am I completely barking up the wrong tree and liable to do more harm than good?0 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Redirecting a Few URLs to a New Domain
We are in the process of buying the blog section of a site. Let's say Site A is buying Site B. We have taken the content from Site B and replicated it on Site A, along with the exact url besides the TLD. We then issued 301 redirects from Site B to Site A and initiated a crawl on those original Site B urls so Google would understand they are now redirecting to Site A. The new urls for Site A, with the same content are now showing up in Google's index if we do a site:SiteA.com search on the big G. Anyone have any experience with this as to how long before Site A urls should replace Site B urls in the search results? I undestand there may be a ranking difference and CTR difference based on domain bias, etc... I'm just asking if everything goes as planned and there isn't a huge issue, does the process take weeks or months?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
Sub Domain
Hi everybody, My competition has started to use the sub-domains vastly. He has created one sub domain for every single city and keyword. Is it something that I should be worried of? Is it a good idea I start doing the same thing? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Armin6660 -
Have thousands of 404s with backlinks. Should I redirect them all at once or over time?
These error pages are being redirected to the most relevant page, not mass redirected to the home page. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Buying an existing domain with higher ranks for redirecting
I've recently came across one of my competitors who's looking to sell their domain. Now they currently rank higher than my primary site for a few keywords we are targeting. Would it be wise to buy the domain and do a name server change over to my primary domain? Would it even help boost ranks for the keywords they rank higher for? Or will the link juice be minimal? Any thoughts would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | upick-1623910