How to deal with tracking numbers in URLs

[MirandaP]

I am working on a site at the minute that has links like this:

Jobs in London

URL looks like: domain.com/jobs-in-london/

However, my developers insist that they need to use tracking codes, so everytime someone clicks on the above link, they are redirected (301) to a new URL that looks like:

domain.com/search/1234567(unique search id)

This is killing me when I am trying to get internal pages, like /jobs-in-london/ ranked.

What to do?

[Keszi]

Hey Miranda,

I would go for one of the following:

1. usage of canonicals (link rel canonical to domain.com/jobs-in-london/)

2. the dev team could use cookies to keep trackings (I am not a developer guy, but this issue has been solved many times with cookies) - Developers please correct me if I am wrong in this.

I hope it hepled,

Istvan

[Dr-Pete]

I think Istvan is absolutely right. You need to canonicalize somehow - it could either be the canonical tag, or you could capture the tracking ID into a cookie and then 301-redirect to the canonical version.

This looks even worse than a typical tracking parameter situation, where it would just be tacked on at the end. It looks like the entire URL structure is changing. Honestly, any CMS that requires this is pretty outdated, IMO. As a former developer, I don't completely buy your developers' story. Doing it the right way may be a lot harder - it may not even be cost-effective - but it's far from impossible. If this structure is weird enough, the canonical or 301 could end up being band-aids.