Page Tracking using Custom URLs - is this viable?
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Hi Moz community!
I’ll try to make this question as easy to understand as possible, but please excuse me if it isn’t clear.
Just joined a new team a few months ago and found out that on some of our most popular pages we use “custom URLs” to track page metrics within Google Analytics. NOTE: I say “custom URLs” because that is the best way for me to describe them.
As an example:
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This page exists to our users: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Ram_HD/2012/photos-interior/
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But this is the URL we have coded on the page: cars-trucks/used-cars/reviews/2012-Ram-HD/photos-interior/ (within the custom variance script labeled as “var l_tracker=” )
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It is this custom URL that we use within GA to look up metrics about this page.
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This is just one example of many across our site setup to do the same thing
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Here is a second example:
- Available page to user: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Cadillac_ATS/2015/
- Custom “var l_tracker=” /cars-trucks/2015-Cadillac-ATS/overview/
- NOTE: There is a small amount of fear that the above method was implemented years ago as a work-around to a poorly structured URL architecture. Not validated, but that is a question that arose.
Main Questions:
- Is the above implementation a normal and often used method to track pages in GA? (coming from an Omniture company before – this would not be how we handled page level tracking)
- Team members at my current company are divided on this method. Some believe this is not a proper implementation and are concerned that trying to hide these from Google will raise red flags (i.e. fake URLs in general = bad)
- I cannot find any reference to this method anywhere on the InterWebs
- If method is not normal: Any recommendations on a solution to address this?
Potential Problems?
- GA is currently cataloguing these tracking URLs in the Crawl Error report. Any concerns about this?
- The team wants to hide the URLs in the Robots.txt file, but some team members are concerned this may raise a red flag with Google and hurt us more than help us.
Thank you in advance for any insight and/or advice.
Chris
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any help?
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