URL Tags / Affiliate tracking help

[pbhatt]

1. If I give a sales rep a unique tag to put at the end of a URL for tracking purposes, will Google index the "www.mysite.com/service.html?unique-tag" version of a page and display it in search results?

2. Would a tool like Xenu be able to find that version of a URL?

Reason for questions: If I give my sales people tags with their names in them, I don't want competitors poaching my sales people by search for all URLs on my domain.

Follow up: are there any other potential issues that I should think about?

Thanks!

[legalseo]

Q1. Google won't index incoming tagged links from email, bookmarks, etc. (although Google Analytics will pick them - and you can configure Analytics to ignore tags - see screenshot - a necessity when understanding PPC traffic in GA). To be sure, try this query to see if you're getting any pages that have tagged incoming links like that indexed:
site:www.mysite.com html?
Q2. Xenu (or a bot) will only find what is put out to be crawled. If tagged URLs are published somewhere, all bets  are off (or bots on).
Why not tag with unique identifiers that only you have the key for? RB92102 = Rob Brown in San Diego?

removequerystring.png

[pbhatt]

Thanks Chas!