CogBlog

Here is something I've been thinking about lately.

When placing online media, graphic ads (banners) or text links, many agencies place a small bit of tracking information in the query string (?the bit after the question mark) of the linked URL. This is often referred to as a "tracking URL".

Link popularity is one measurement of the importance of a website by looking at the number and importance of the sites linking to it. Google incorporates link popularity into their much-discussed Page Rank number. You can get some idea of your link popularity by checking the number and types of sites linking to you, as compared to your competitors.

Here is an interesting test:
According to Google how many pages link to Google.com?
328,000 pages today.
How many link to Yahoo!?
496,000 pages.

So is Yahoo more important than Google? Maybe, although many of those 496,000 pages are probably pages within the Yahoo domain.

But, back to the original issue. What I'm wondering is whether a large campaign loses some of the link popularity benefit via tracking URLs. Instead of spreading thousands of links directly to your landing page, you are spreading thousands of links to thousands of unique URLs on your domain. By altering the query string, you are effectively identifying a new page. We've seen that sponsored listings ultimately make it into search indices, complete with tracking information. We still see visitors come from Yahoo campaigns that have ended over a year ago. But, those links were spidered and incorporated into search indices, where they may live forever.