Web Usability, Experience and SEO Blog

» Yahoo!'s Dynamic URL Rewrite

It’s the new year already – and 17 days in!  I’ve been MIA on the blog front but not for lack of good intentions. I have a few topics in my head but carving out the time to jot them down requires my laptop be offline and at least a 1.5 hour plane ride. Hence this post I write on my way home from some internal meetings.

I few months ago I posted a blog around the topic of indexed URLs with tracking parameters. I’m pleased to say I’ve seen one of the major search engines address in full force. My comment in the previous post was really an observation and follow-on question as to whether Google figured out a way to eliminate some of HP’s duplicate URLs generated by tracking parameters (primarily for marketing reasons). The bigger question was, however, in their mass deletion of duplicate content created by these tracking parameters were they nice enough to consolidate the link popularity to the base URL?  

I never really got the answer to that question but meanwhile Yahoo! has been busy developing a tool within Yahoo! Site Explorer that allows me to directly communicate to them exactly what tracking parameters to ignore – thus removing duplicate content in their index while combining all link popularity to the base URL. It also solves other issues like over-measuring referrals for a campaign because the marketing URL with the tracking parameter was indexed and served in natural search results. This is a great feature and, while I’m excited that Yahoo! has provided this as an option for SEOs, I’d love to see the other engines also provide such functionality.

The feature on Yahoo! is called “Dynamic URL Rewrite” and I encourage any webmaster or SEO to provide rewrite information through Yahoo! Site Explorer. Once we saw this released we quickly jumped on it and we’ve seen a significant drop in indexed URLs with our tracking parameters and an improvement in ranking for many of the pages where proliferation of the tracking URLs was a significant problem. Bravo Yahoo! for developing a feature in your toolbox that solves a common problem for the engine, the webmaster, the site SEO, the marketers and the searchers!