Jim McIntosh

Internal link tracking took a toll on SEO

This will be a short post. I just want to make sure I capture this thought before I forget to mention it.

We are focusing on SEO activities for 2008 right now and we found something that is a little embarrassing to me. Due to the way I was tacking on query parameters to track various cross sell functions on the site I was splitting the PageRank for many of our top selling products.

There is a box we show on every category, subcategory and product group page that lists the top selling SKUs within that section of the taxonomy. I added tracking (?CSP_ID=SKU) to each link, as I do for all cross sell merchandising sections so that I can tell management which effort is most productive.

What made this so bad was that most all the other cross sell merchandising happens on the product detail pages though. So, I wasn’t redirecting much of the PageRank to any one individual SKU to another. But, this best sellers set of links was being linked to from many of the parent level sections of the taxonomy and was splitting so much of the PageRank that the Women’s Denali Jacket with the CSP_ID tracking was actually given a PR score of 4 and the URL without tracking that you’d find if you use the navigation had a PR score of 3.

We will now be implementing link tracking across all elements of the site, navigation or merchandising, by passing some parameters from the link to a cookie that will be collected on the destination page rather than in the query string.

One of the outcomes of this new method will allow me to track “all” links in the template and alternate merchandising sections without adding any query parameters. This is a big plus and a great lesson learned. I’ll report back if, or when, we see results for that Women’s Denali Jacket. I’m such an optimist.