SEO

Do Links With UTM Parameters Pass The Same Link Equity?

Published

3 years ago

February 8, 2022

Do Links With UTM Parameters Pass The Same Link Equity?

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Jeff in Houston, who writes:

“We have a very authoritative site linking to our website. We set them up with UTM parameters to track traffic and sales that they make.

This is what it looks like:
https://www.example.com/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=example

We have the canonical of this page pointing to the homepage without the parameters.
<link rel=”canonical” href=https://www.example.com/”>

Questions:

Do the UTM parameters still pass the same link equity if it didn’t have a UTM parameter? (I would think that if a link contains a UTM parameter, it would not be considered a “natural link,” as why would they put parameters in there if it’s organic?)
Should we 301 redirect the UTM parameter page to the homepage instead of just the canonical?
If we 301 redirect the UTM parameter, will we still be able to track it under the parameters set?
This is a sitewide footer link, which I would not suggest on a normal site, but this site is a nonprofit AND one of the most authoritative sites in the health niche.”

Great questions Jeff!

I agree with you that the link will not be considered a “natural link,” but a redirect will not help you.

And yes, you can still track sales.

Let’s dive in!

A quick background for others reading this (not aimed at you Jeff, this is in general):

The first and foremost thing to remember here is that this is not a backlink or a link for SEO.

When you provide UTM sources to a publisher, the link is now a paid media link and should be treated as such with “nofollow” or “sponsored” markup attached.

The website must also disclose the relationship to follow FTC and U.K./E.U. advertising guidelines if any payment was made, including to the journalist, affiliate commissions, advertorial fees, product for review, etc.

The FTC has a great PDF doc here on how to do this.

In your case, you have a footer link across the site, so you’ll want to have your general counsel look over sponsorship and disclosure laws if you paid the organization or sponsored them to get the link.

Most major media sites already have disclosures at the top of pages because they are monetizing through advertorials and affiliate marketing.

Even if your link is not an advertorial or affiliate link, the disclosure on the page may signal to a search engine spider that the parameters are for tracking and that your link is not “natural.”

Once the search engines see the parameters, they will likely consider your backlink a paid link.

Even if you did not pay any money or compensate the site, those parameters are not naturally occurring.

The only time a backlink will carry UTM parameters is if the journalist or blogger clicked through an affiliate/paid media link to your website, and your domain does not force a redirect to a version of the page without the parameters.

In these instances, the parameters will match the original article and not be 100% unique to this page and site.

Because your parameters outlined above are unique to the page and site, your parameters show search engines that your link is not a natural one, and the link should not pass link equity.

Once the backlink is found, one of two things will likely happen:

Search engines will ignore the link and assume the website linking to you forgot to add the “sponsored” attribute. This is out of your control and you are not likely to get any benefit or a penalty.
Your website gets an unnatural link devaluation or worse, a penalty because you are leaving a trackable footprint of paid backlinks for them to find. This will depend on how many sites you have linking to you with parameters or that are unnatural. This could also include link farms, PBNs (private blogger networks), etc.

There is one more outlier though – you have a sitewide footer link, so a search engine spider may assume you have a business relationship with the organization. This could add some value.

Amazon does the same with their properties in the footer, for example.

In order to give you a more definitive answer, I’d need to know what your website is and which organization you have the links from.

For the 301 redirect questions, probably no.

If the mention of your company is for a product or category, redirecting to your homepage will create a bad user experience and decrease your conversions.

I’m also not sure why you’re concerned with a canonical link, as there is no canonical link for a backlink or footer link.

Canonical links are in the <head> of a page, not on a footer link.

If you force a redirect, keep the person on the intended page from the article.

And yes, you can still track the sales, including from the footer links.

Ways To Track Sales From The Referring URL Without UTM Parameters

There are numerous ways to track without parameters.

Here are two simple ones to get you started.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to see sales by referring URL. You can drill down to the specific page from that URL.

Set your time range to include the date the article was published and you can find the sales, unique visitors, email sign-ups, and more from that page.

Bonus tip: By knowing which specific pages generate more newsletter signups, conversions, etc., you can ask the nonprofit (or publisher) how to get more and better features on that page to hopefully increase your volume.

And if you know how to research the traffic sources of these pages, you can find other similar sources and get a nice big revenue burst for your company.

2. Affiliate Network

A reputable affiliate network will also work but you must look at how they bill before moving forward.

A good affiliate network will charge you based on how much the affiliate earns per sale.

A not-so-good affiliate network will charge you on the total sale amount.

An okay one (and one you don’t want to do this with) will charge you on total transactions processed.

Here’s how to find this.

We’re going to assume:

There is a sale for $100.
You pay a 10% commission to top-funnel affiliates.
And you pay 1% to bottom-funnel/low-value partners.

Let’s also assume the network has a 25% override (what they charge for fees).

A good network, in this case, will show you:

$10 commission for the affiliate.
$2.50 cents for the top funnel partner.
$1 commission for the low-value partner.
$0.25 for the network.

The network fee changes because they are being billed on what the affiliate makes, regardless of whether the affiliate adds value to your company or not.

A bad network will show you a $10 commission for the affiliate and a $2.5 network fee for them regardless of what the affiliate makes.

This is because the network is charging you on sale amount, not what the affiliate made in commission.

This is essential to look at, especially if you have coupon sites and cash-back browser extensions in your program.

If you do and they are taking the last click (the person is at checkout and types your brand + coupons into Google), you likely won’t see the sales from your link as the non-top funnel partner is overriding your tracking.

In answer to your question, using parameters on a backlink will make it “not natural.” It is not likely to help your SEO and could potentially hurt you.

Instead, use your analytics package or a tracking platform such as that offered through an affiliate network (just remember you won’t get any link equity from affiliate links, either).

I hope this helps answer your question and thank you for reading!

More resources:

Ask an SEO is a weekly SEO advice column written by some of the industry’s top SEO experts, who have been hand-picked by Search Engine Journal. Got a question about SEO? Fill out our form. You might see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!

Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock

Source link

Related Topics:Equity Link links Parameters Pass UTM

Up Next

Google Will Likely Index Content That’s Important

Don't Miss

5 Big Ways Bing SEO Differs From Optimizing For Google

Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

SEO

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

Published

6 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.

Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic

The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.

Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.

Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:

“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “

The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”

Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:

“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”

That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.

A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:

“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”

Facing Reality Is Productive

Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:

Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay

WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.

Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.

Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.

The live webinar featured:

Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.

WordPress Market Share Stagnation

The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.

Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.

Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.

Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.

CMS YoY Growth

Webflow: 25.00%
Shopify: 15.61%
Wix: 10.71%
Squarespace: 9.04%
Duda: 8.89%
WordPress: 1.85%

Why Stagnation Is A Problem

An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.

It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:

“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”

Perception Of Innovation

One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.

It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:

“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”

Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.

“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”

Is Improved Marketing A Solution

One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.

Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:

“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”

This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.

They said:

“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”

Future Of WordPress

This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.

The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.

Watch the webinar:

Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com

Source link

SEO

Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Published

1 day ago

August 31, 2024

Max

Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.

How AVIF Can Improve SEO

Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.

Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.

It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:

Improve your site’s crawl efficiency

Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.

What Is AVIF?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).

AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.

AVIF Versus WebP

AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.

Is AVIF Supported?

AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.

I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.

Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.

Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.

AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google

According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.

“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”

Read Google’s announcement:

Supporting AVIF in Google Search

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands

Source link

SEO

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 30, 2024

Max

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.

This is what Eli had to say:

“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.

This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”

Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.

What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?

Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.

Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.

Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)

“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.

Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”

Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion

Read the discussion on LinkedIn:

Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands

Source link