When you need actively to track where your visitors are coming from – say because you are running several campaigns – you need to now where your visitors are coming from. No, seriously, it DOES matter. 🙂

The “normal” way to do this is to add some parameters to the URL. Like e.g. myrurl.com/?track=siminar_url 
The downside of this is that the URL then is seen as a new URL by the seach engines (Google in short). This triggers dublicate contect filters since you can basically find the same stuff on 2 or more different URLs.

One solution is to use the new canonical tag : https://webhaj.boostme.dk/canonical-tag-state-your-canonical-url/

But an easier one is to use the # (called hash or pound sign), since this is basically seen as an internal link on the same page and the seach engines therefore just ignores this!

To have Google Analytics track these you need a little hack provided by Avinash Kaushik. Use this JavaScript:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1"); 

// Solution for domain level only
pageTracker._trackPageview(document.location.pathname + "/"
+ document.location.hash); 

// If you have a path included in the URL as well 
pageTracker._trackPageview(document.location.pathname
+ document.location.search + "/" + document.location.hash); 

Read more on: http://janeandrobot.com/post/URL-Referrer-Tracking.aspx – scroll down to “URL Fragment”

And: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

Great news for all of us struggeling to make sure that dublicate content filters are not activated (since we all know that this is really important for SEO).

Google, Yahoo and  Live (Microsoft) is now supporting the new a new canonical tag, which states which URL is “the right one” for every single page onm a site.

E.g. if one of my pages can be accessed via https://webhaj.boostme.dk/?p=3 as well as via  https://webhaj.boostme.dk/canonical-tag-state-your-canonical-url/– one of them will trigger the dublicate content filter. Chances are that the page filteret is not the one I would be prefer to get filteret. And if users access both pages and links both pages my SEO is hurt too, since the 2 URLs split all the link juice that should have been collected by the 1 page..

All I need to do now to make the search engines use the URL that I prefer is to add a tag like this on the page:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoast.com/twitter/analytics/"/>

Our friend Joost de Valk have already made some plugins to handle this easily – including for Drupal and WordPress: http://yoast.com/canonical-url-links/