New Feature: Yahoo! Dynamic URL Rewrite January 28
One of my ongoing requests for the engines is for them to allow us - i.e. webmasters and SEOs - to share more information about how to eliminate duplicate URLs created by campaign tracking URLs. I’m pleased to say I’ve seen one of the major search engines address in full force.
Yahoo! developed a tool within Yahoo! Site Explorer that allows SEOs 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!
