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I found some tools online that address some of my concerns about using UTM codes that I think will help a lot.

First, this poster developed a script that removes UTM codes from the URL in the address bar of a user's browser so they are gone when a user copy and pastes the link from there. Doesn't help if people copy the link directly out of the press release but my feeling is that more people get it from the address bar anyway. That should go a long way to make sure there aren't links out in the wild with inappropriate UTM codes attached.
https://websiteadvantage.com.au/Google-Analytics-UTM-Removal

Second, this poster created a script that dynamically replaces the utm_source code with the name of the referring site any time it processes a link where the utm_source code is set to the word "dynamic". That means any traffic that comes from sites that have UTM codes on the links will still have their source tracked properly.
https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2014/06/11/campaign-tracking-dynamic-source/

Now that I have these tools, I'm planning on including UTM tags in my press release links. To build links conservatively per the Whiteboard Friday I mentioned earlier, I'm going to point the links at canonical versions of my pages or at URL's that are 301 redirected to the relevant pages. Still not sure if this is a great strategy so I'd love to hear people's thoughts, but I will try it out and see how it goes in the meantime.

Thanks John. That post does include a good tip about keeping UTM tags SEO-friendly, although it doesn't address whether or not UTM codes are good way to track press release traffic. The issue with UTM codes that concerns me the most is that anyone that copies and pastes links with the UTM codes elsewhere on the web does not have their traffic source tracked properly.

Yes we moved to https in the last year and I just confirmed that all properties and views are set to https. Good thought, though!

Hi John,

I feel like over the years more and more of my traffic is incorrectly showing up in Google Analytics with a "direct" source and have confirmed that is the case with some of my referral traffic, so I've been using UTM codes more often to correctly credit referrers in my reports.

Ideally the only UTM parameter I'd use would be the "Campaign" parameter so I could easily see aggregate statistics about traffic generated by the press release in GA regardless of source. However, I believe you're required to include source and medium parameters when using UTM codes, which is what makes all traffic look like it's coming from the same place when the link is copied to other sites. If I could just set a campaign parameter and let Google fill in the blanks for source and medium that would be great. Does anyone know if that works?

Alternatively I'm considering creating new pages on my site that are duplicates of existing pages with appropriate canonical links and linking to the new pages in my release. I was inspired by the concept of "canonical burn pages" that I first heard in this Whiteboard Friday.
https://moz.com/blog/risk-averse-link-building-whiteboard-friday

This method would address quite a few of my concerns:

• links look natural
• traffic from any source that ends up using this unique URL will be inherently aggregated when viewing reports for that URL
• Google should report accurate "source" data
• can kill the page if I end up with a lot of spammy inbound links

The only downside I can see is that we'll have to maintain duplicate pages, but I suppose we could put a 301 redirect on the URL at some point down the road and abandon the duplicate.

This strategy is still a work in progress so I'd still love to hear anyone else's thoughts about the best ways to link from press releases.

I'm wondering what people recommend for linking from press releases; specifically, what kind of tracking parameters people add to their links, if any.

My first thought is to add UTM tracking parameters for Google Analytics, but I have a few concerns:

• bloggers that copy our link from the release include the tracking parameters in the links from their site, which would only identify the traffic as coming from the release and not the specific sites
• UTM parameters in the link may make it look less natural to Google

Also, I've considered using shortened URL's without parameters in the release that get 301 redirected to the relevant pages, which I thought might have a few benefits:

• the links look more natural (no tracking parameters)
• UTM parameters could be added as part of the redirect after the fact
• if the release attracted links from spammy sources for some reason I could kill the redirect, which I'm hoping would effectively kill the link

My company doesn't rely on press releases for link building, which we understand to have been ineffective for a long time, but we do send them out occasionally and want the most effective links for tracking and SEO.

I'd love to hear if anyone has thoughts on these assumptions, or if anyone has different linking strategies that they have found strike the right balance of SEO and tracking considerations. Thanks!

Great, thanks Carson! You're insights have been very helpful. I think we'll try to make the on-page ajax solution work.

Thanks for the link! I can see how Google offers me a way to tell it how to use my site variables. It seems like between managing parameters in webmaster tools, using canonical links and adding meta noindex tags on variable pages, there should be enough to keep things in order with the search engines. And I can just assume Google knows not to waste too much crawl budget on the variable pages.

I was considering one other option that would remove concerns about variables altogether. Using a different extension, I can set up Magento's layered navigation to work on the page without updating the URL. This eliminates the need for canonicals, parameters, and everything else that is more in Google's control than mine. What do you think of that as a solution?

This gets into an issue of bots and crawling where I am less clear. Even with canonicals, don't search engine bots crawl all of the pages produced with faceted navigation? That will easily reach 10,000+ pages on my site, which currently has a total number of pages in the low hundreds.  I was under the impression I don't want to set up the faceted navigation in a way where the bots crawl through every combination of pages created by my products' attribute filters and bog the bots down in a quagmire of low-value pages. But I'm not sure if that's the case or how concerned I need to be about the bots spending their time on those pages.

I am trying to deal with the duplicate content issues presented by Magento's layered navigation feature (aka faceted navigation). I installed Amasty's Improved Navigation extension (https://amasty.com/improved-layered-navigation.html) and it offers the option to hide the layered navigation from specific user agents (ie googlebot, bingbot, etc).

This seems like cloaking to me and I hesitate to try it, unless hiding faceted navigation from specific user agents is known to be acceptable to Google (white hat practice). Does anyone know if this the case?

My company has switched to a new ecommerce platform that we are not totally familiar with yet. As we've worked with it, we've had a couple situations where both the front and back ends of our site crashed simultaneously (always after installing a third party module). The platform's built-in backup solution hasn't been an option in those situations so we've been coming up with alternatives.

We now have a duplicate of the site on our server for such emergencies. The plan is to have pages on the broken site point to the backup site using 302 redirects until the broken site is fixed.

Is this correct usage of the 302 redirect? I often see people recommend to never use 302 redirects, but I thought this might be the kind of situation where they'd be appropriate. If so, are there other SEO considerations we should keep in mind? For example, I'm wondering if we should put canonical tags on the temporary site that point to the broken site so the broken site stays in the SE indexes.

I'm wondering what people recommend for linking from press releases; specifically, what kind of tracking parameters people add to their links, if any.

My first thought is to add UTM tracking parameters for Google Analytics, but I have a few concerns:

• bloggers that copy our link from the release include the tracking parameters in the links from their site, which would only identify the traffic as coming from the release and not the specific sites
• UTM parameters in the link may make it look less natural to Google

Also, I've considered using shortened URL's without parameters in the release that get 301 redirected to the relevant pages, which I thought might have a few benefits:

• the links look more natural (no tracking parameters)
• UTM parameters could be added as part of the redirect after the fact
• if the release attracted links from spammy sources for some reason I could kill the redirect, which I'm hoping would effectively kill the link

My company doesn't rely on press releases for link building, which we understand to have been ineffective for a long time, but we do send them out occasionally and want the most effective links for tracking and SEO.

I'd love to hear if anyone has thoughts on these assumptions, or if anyone has different linking strategies that they have found strike the right balance of SEO and tracking considerations. Thanks!

My company has switched to a new ecommerce platform that we are not totally familiar with yet. As we've worked with it, we've had a couple situations where both the front and back ends of our site crashed simultaneously (always after installing a third party module). The platform's built-in backup solution hasn't been an option in those situations so we've been coming up with alternatives.

We now have a duplicate of the site on our server for such emergencies. The plan is to have pages on the broken site point to the backup site using 302 redirects until the broken site is fixed.

Is this correct usage of the 302 redirect? I often see people recommend to never use 302 redirects, but I thought this might be the kind of situation where they'd be appropriate. If so, are there other SEO considerations we should keep in mind? For example, I'm wondering if we should put canonical tags on the temporary site that point to the broken site so the broken site stays in the SE indexes.

Hi John,

I feel like over the years more and more of my traffic is incorrectly showing up in Google Analytics with a "direct" source and have confirmed that is the case with some of my referral traffic, so I've been using UTM codes more often to correctly credit referrers in my reports.

Ideally the only UTM parameter I'd use would be the "Campaign" parameter so I could easily see aggregate statistics about traffic generated by the press release in GA regardless of source. However, I believe you're required to include source and medium parameters when using UTM codes, which is what makes all traffic look like it's coming from the same place when the link is copied to other sites. If I could just set a campaign parameter and let Google fill in the blanks for source and medium that would be great. Does anyone know if that works?

Alternatively I'm considering creating new pages on my site that are duplicates of existing pages with appropriate canonical links and linking to the new pages in my release. I was inspired by the concept of "canonical burn pages" that I first heard in this Whiteboard Friday.
https://moz.com/blog/risk-averse-link-building-whiteboard-friday

This method would address quite a few of my concerns:

• links look natural
• traffic from any source that ends up using this unique URL will be inherently aggregated when viewing reports for that URL
• Google should report accurate "source" data
• can kill the page if I end up with a lot of spammy inbound links

The only downside I can see is that we'll have to maintain duplicate pages, but I suppose we could put a 301 redirect on the URL at some point down the road and abandon the duplicate.

This strategy is still a work in progress so I'd still love to hear anyone else's thoughts about the best ways to link from press releases.