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If you are using an analytic program, you have likely encountered the power of tracking your paid advertising efforts by utilizing tracking tags on your URLs.  But can tracking tags actually do more harm than good?  Are you using the right tracking methodology to measure your campaigns effectiveness?

I was recently asked these questions from a colleague of mine who was wondering what the best way to track a text link from another website with IndexTools Analytics.   In short, I advised that the easiest way was to set up the campaign in the analytics to track visitors from the referring parent domain URL versus using a tracking tag because it would avoid duplicate content and also pass link juice to the website.  However, when tracking PPC visitors, its best to track from the landing page URL with a unique tag.  Clear as mud right?  Allow me to elaborate…

If you set up your analytics to track a referring or entry page URL such as www.url.com/?source=websitelink that’s published on another website, the good news is that it will track the visitor in the right bucket.  However, the bad news is that you run the risk that a search engine will crawl that URL and treat it as a unique page which unfortunately looks like an exact replica of www.url.com/ thus potentially diluting your PageRank.  To correct this, a better methodology would be to set your analytics to look for the referring parent URL (like www.url.com) if the link appears on more than one page of the same website or set it to track the exact referring URL such as www.url.com/page-that-your-link-appears-on if its on a single page.  By doing so, you will avoid the duplicate content issue and also receive link credit.

When tracking PPC campaigns, this is usually not possible because most PPC vendors like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. place your ads on more than just one site and also would be confused with your organic search visitors.  To remedy this, setting your analytics to look for a unique landing page entry URL such as www.url.com/?source=adwords will allow your analytics to count all the visitors that was delivered by that advertising network regardless from where they arrived from.

If you are currently using tracking tags on your advertising campaigns, don’t panic. You only need to begin worrying about websites that provide a direct link to your website and many don’t for internal tracking purposes.   In addition, your analytics solution likely has all of your campaigns located in a central place where you can begin your search for websites that you are currently tracking.  With a little investigation, you should be able to locate campaigns and revise them with ease.

For more information on how to deal with tracking tags and other tips, please visit Google, duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and you

If you didn’t recently hear, there was a RageRank update a couple of days ago. As webmaster’s across the country take notice, many either panic or sit back and relax. This raises a fundamental question to many newcomers of SEO: “Does PageRank really matter?”

Although I’m not the first to tackle this issue, i have always found humor in this subject because many die-hard SEO experts say that PageRank doesn’t matter, but secretly are happy to see if their little green bar goes up or down a notch. This was evidently clear when the last major PR update caused the blogosphere to light up like a Christmas tree of bloggers complaining about losing pagerank in dismay. But frankly, I like the the little green bar because of its ability to quickly delineate a websites link popularity. Sure, it may not be exact, but what other tool do you know of that gives you immediate feedback about a sites link authority just by logging onto a site?

For me, seeing PageRank may not tell the whole story, but it certainly gives me how much work needs to be done at a quick glance. The argument about regarding PageRank is that its not a true measure of a sites linking popularity. This i believe to be true in that it doesn’t give you the best understanding of all the sites that may be linking to a website. In addition, if the website is fairly new or was recently redone, PageRank either will not show up for the whole site or may be missing for some pages. If you are unsure of a websites link popularity, i recommend using the following free tools:

1. Google’s Webmaster Tools
2. Yahoo! Site Explorer
3. Market Leap

Regardless, as a good rule of thumb, the higher the PageRank, the easier it is to rank a site. However, its improtant to note that this is not the single or most important attribute when it comes to search engine optimization and achiveing high SERPS, but it certainly helps. If a SEO expert tries to tell you it doesnt matter, he likely has a rationale of its underabilty to truely describe a sites linking archedteure. But don’t be fooled, although its a simple 1 - 10 ruler, it’s still a good measure of how Google values the overall importance of a websites linking partners. Futhermore, if i could push a button to increase your websites PageRank a couple of notches, i would be hard pressed to find a SEO that wouldn’t want a little extra link juice:)