Monday, February 9, 2009

Web Analytics vs. SEO - Who will reign supreme?

Ok, this comes up often enough at work and I was wondering how people handle it.

When you have links coming back to your site, you can track things or you can improve your SEO with extra linkbacks.

The argument is do you:
A) Track everything so you know what's going on and can segment your traffic
B) Enjoy an SEO bump with a link to a non-duplicated page

Now, here we've already established that Paid Search and Banners are ok - spiders aren't really going to hit those. Until today I figured email was fine too, since obviously a google spider will not be browsing my inbox. There's a little internal debate about the fact that if people post the link in their email somewhere, that's going to dilute SEO efforts, but that leaves me with 3 thoughts:

1) No one's going to post that link. Maybe they'll forward the email with the link, but posting?
2) if they do post it, even the few that do, does it really have an seo impact? Does it lower our overall rank or does it just dilute any gains this effort would have?
3) And even if it does have a very minor impact, is it worth completely being in the dark on a major email campaign?

I'm trying to scope it into a benefit vs damage ratio. Like if SEO only benefits a 1 (out of 10) and Measurement efforts are damaged 10/10, then it's a .1, which stinks. If Measurement benefits a 10 but SEO is damaged a 10, then it's a 1, which isn't very good either. If Measurement benefits a 10 and SEO is only damaged a 1, then we've got a 10:1 ratio, which is nice.

Just wondering how people handle this little tug of war in their lines of work.

1 comment:

airviewing said...

you can specify a canonical URL http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html