5 replies to this topic

[mcairney]

Hello,

I work in the field of marketing and I'm attempting to set up some tracking policies so we can determine the effectivness of our print advertising campaigns. GoDaddy offers a forwarding service which I am considering taking advantage of. I would purchase distinct domain names which would be listed in each of our different ads. When a visitor entered the various domains they would all end up back at our company's index page. I am not attempting to boost our PR, or manipulate the system, I simply want to track our leads. Would this be considered innapropriate by the search engines, and could we be penalized? Thank you for any help you can offer.

-mcairney

[Artie]

Hm....pretty good question:-) I've always been trying to find a perfect way of sales tracking. Because of P3P Privacy Policy any traffic stats I tried wasn't able to give me accurate stats when it was about sales tracking. Indeed using keyword oriented domain names is a great....

But you know what? You understand that you don't want to manipulate with your PR and I believe you, but I don't think Google will do:-( Just think about if there is a technical difference between usual doorway pages spam technic and your issue.

You gonna use redirect from 'keywords' domains to your real site domain name.....hm.....I can't see any difference.

[Randy]

I don't see any problem with it mcairney.

As usual, it's not the method one uses that is spammy or stands a chance of receiving a penalty, but in how it is implemented. What you describe is perfectly acceptable to track the traffic each ad receives. And is in fact used by many companies.

[Alan Perkins]

You should have no problems at all as far as spam is concerned.

Depending how the forwarding is done, a search engine spider may or may not be able to follow it, and may vary the URL under which your home page content is indexed (so, for example, it could end up being indexed under one of your tracking URLs). If you don't take this into account it will affect the accuracy of your tracking.

[mcairney]

Thanks for the input! Randy, how would you suggest the forwarding be done, so as not to vary the URL under which our home page content is indexed.

[mcairney]

Excuse me. That last question was directed towards Alan. Sorry about that.