Mar 25 2009

Make Sure Your URLs Are Link- and Social-Bookmarking-Friendly

What I am noticing quite often is that pages entered from the feed reader or email newsletter have additional (tracking) URL parameters, e.g.

While few sites (e.g. StumbleUpon) can recognize these URLs and attach reviews and votes to the base version, plenty of popular social bookmarking and voting sites (like Digg and Sphinn) will accept both URLs as separate and this will result in duplicate submissions.

This may also result in “ugly” versions being linked to and spread around.

Have you ever observed related issues and do you know the way to solve them?

16 Responses to “Make Sure Your URLs Are Link- and Social-Bookmarking-Friendly”

  1. Bill_Sebald (Bill Sebald) says:
    December 31, 1969 at 11:59 pm

    Make Sure Your URLs Are Link- and Social-Bookmarking-Friendly http://tinyurl.com/dbhbhh

  2. GrowMap (GrowMap) says:
    December 31, 1969 at 11:59 pm

    RT @Bill_Sebald Make Sure Your URLs Are Link- and Social-Bookmarking-Friendly http://tinyurl.com/dbhbhh

  3. Fabio Ricotta says:
    March 25, 2009 at 7:48 pm

    What you think about some WordPress plugins that create a shortener URLs? So you can use it on your social submissions.

    Fabio Ricotta’s last incredible blog post..Como Fazer o Google Encontrar o seu Site?

    seobag Reply:
    March 26th, 2009 at 8:44 am

    In WordPress you can use “Permalinks”.
    http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#permalinks

  4. Frank Marcel says:
    March 25, 2009 at 7:48 pm

    As soon as it is dupe content and you use the canonical link element, there’s no need to worry about how search engines would deal this issue.

    Social bookmarking and voting sites should try something similar, checking for a canonical link element or maybe checking dupe content instead of only checking dupe URLs.

    Frank Marcel’s last incredible blog post..Como Fazer o Google Encontrar o seu Site?

    Fabio Ricotta Reply:
    March 25th, 2009 at 7:54 pm

    Nice idea Frank. Using canonical tag you can solve it to SE but you can’t solve the problem for social media websites. They still accept both URLs.

    Fabio Ricotta’s last incredible blog post..Como Fazer o Google Encontrar o seu Site?

  5. Erica Anderson says:
    March 25, 2009 at 7:53 pm

    How do SEs feel about redir’s?

  6. B. Moore says:
    March 26, 2009 at 5:02 am

    So i have a static website and i use the google url builder for certain links on my site, how do i get those some tracking features out all the extras that google puts on the link??

  7. Overkast says:
    March 26, 2009 at 5:50 pm

    I think social media sites have to fix this issue. We can only prevent the negative effects.

    I also think the problem is not so much duplicate content but screwing up your campaign. Some search engines have figured out tacking codes.

    But….Would adding a wild card entry to the robots.txt file for the tracking code work to prevent it from begin index? (ex: Disallow: *?utm_)

  8. Designer Houston says:
    April 25, 2009 at 4:11 am

    I completely agree with OverKast the social media site should find a way to fix these urls issues.
    Disallowing through the robots.txt file I think is the only solutions.

  9. rtrefgfd says:
    July 15, 2009 at 4:22 pm

  10. Ronan Paulo says:
    July 21, 2009 at 6:23 pm

    I also think like Overkast. SE’s improved the way that they deal with duplicated content issues…

  11. louis vuitton says:
    October 4, 2009 at 7:20 am

    Make Sure Your URLs Are Link- and Social-Bookmarking-Friendly

  12. andri says:
    December 4, 2009 at 2:36 am

    That’s why permalink is important :)

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  14. World of Warcraft Brasil says:
    October 23, 2011 at 6:29 pm

    In WordPress use permalinks!
    Nice post!