Stephan Spencer's Scatterings

The Scattered Wisdom of a scientist turned web marketing virtuoso

March 2010
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The Problem with Embedding Tracking Codes in your URLs

The problem with embedding a tracking code into URLs to track referrals from particular marketing campaigns or from particular partners is that inevitably those URLs end up in other places, such as in the search engines. Thus your referral numbers become… more »
Posted by Stephan Spencer on 05/08/2006 | Permalink

Comments (3)| Comments RSS | Filed under: Search Engines, Web Analytics google, tracking codes, urls, web metrics, web stats            

What should be your corporate blog's URL?

A reader emailed me with the following question: I was wondering if you have a POV, on if a blog should live on a corporate domain name (ex. company.com) or if it would be better to have the domain name be different from the corp. (ex. companyblog.com… more »
Posted by Stephan Spencer on 03/19/2006 | Permalink

Comments (11)| Comments RSS | Filed under: Search Engines, Blogging link building, urls            

Are you a member of the Invisible Web Club?

Despite the increasing use of search engine friendly URLs, custom meta tags and cleaner navigation, there's a lot of web content out there that is inaccessible to the search engines. Perhaps it is in the "too hard basket" for many designers. In which… more »
Posted by Stephan Spencer on 02/08/2006 | Permalink

Comments (3)| Comments RSS | Filed under: Usability, Search Engines navigation, search_engine_optimization, seo, urls            

Blog SEO Tip #2: Your URLs

Dynamic URLs can impede the search engine spiders from fully spidering and indexing your blog. Err on the side of caution and use "rewritten" URLs. The excellent (and free!) blogging software WordPress supports URL rewriting, so you can have nice, search… more »
Posted by Stephan Spencer on 01/10/2006 | Permalink

Comments (1)| Comments RSS | Filed under: Search Engines, Blogging blog optimization, rewriting, seo, urls            

Googlebot, parameters and dynamic sites

I previously mentioned that Matt Cutts from Google gave some advice to webmasters of dynamic (database driven) web sites. For one thing, Matt advised that if you have a dynamic web site, you should minimize the number of parameters in the URL. You’r… more »
Posted by Stephan Spencer on 08/27/2005 | Permalink

Comments (0)| Comments RSS | Filed under: Search Engines complex urls, dynamic web site, google, googlebot, matt cutts, parameters, url variations, urls            

Spiders like Googlebot choke on Session IDs

Many ecommerce sites have session IDs or user IDs in the URL of their pages. This tends to cause either the pages to not get indexed by search engines like Google, or to cause the pages to get included many times over and over, clogging up the index with… more »
Posted by Stephan Spencer on 06/25/2004 | Permalink

Comments (1)| Comments RSS | Filed under: General ecommerce sites, googlebot, pagerank, pagerank_dilution, seo, session id, spiders, spider_trap, urls