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Why Using Tracking Links In Article Resource Boxes Can Block Your Link Popularity

by Detlev Reimer

You will have been said a hundred times that you need to track everything that is related to your marketing campaigns or you will fail. Yes, this is really important because otherwise, you won't know anything about the marketing success of each individual ad.

But What If You Decide For The Wrong Tracking Method?

In order to be able to decide what tracking methods you can choose from, here's a short reminder:

1. Use a tracking service like AdMinder or Hypertracker. With this method, the original links are disguised with a link like http://www.adminder.com/w.cgi?R45487_dhgtr.

If you click on such a link, you are automatically forwarded to the website you have specified. You can see the number of clicks in your members' area of the tracking service.

2. Set up mirror pages/multiple autoresponders. Setting up multiple autoresponders for tracking e-mail responses e.g. report1@getresponse.com report2@getresponse.com report3@getresponse.com etc.

You can easily see, how many times each autoresponder has been hit and you can determine how successful each of your ad campaigns was.

Mirror pages are duplicates of your main pages. If you create different directories for your promotions, you will be able to see the results in your logfiles, e.g. http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/promo1 and in this directory you just have a copy of your index.html file. Or you can set up a redirect, which leads immediately to your index.html without having to copy it into this new directory.

3. The ? - method. This is a method that can be used for e-mails as well as for websites. If you write an e-mail link, you can set the subject after the question mark. It would look like this:

mailto:abcd@host.com?subject=report1

The e-mail would would go to abcd@host.com and the subject line would automatically contain the subject "report1" without having it to enter manually. You will certainly have seen this many times already.

If you use this method with a website, you can create a link like: http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/chap1.htm?position6 and you will be able to track the hits by checking your logfiles (this is something that you should do at least once a week if you want to know how successful your website really is). The text following the question mark does not affect the page that is called.

Now Which Tracking Method Should You Choose?

First of all, to be able to decide about this question, you need to know one important thing about search engines: They don't index dynamic pages. This means that pages which are created by using perl (cgi), php or asp are not indexed properly.

Most of the times there is database that delivers the results of some search requests. You can recognize dynamic pages by the question mark and by a repeating of the search terms in the URL or often the links contain several dozens of numbers and letters.

Examples would be:

http://www.domain.net/search.pl?Terms=business%20opportunities or http://www.domain.net/search.asp?chdr84j3339s042kfmdjhwww

The point is, of course there are many great tracking programs and services out there but using them in your article resource box doesn't give you a direct link back to your website. Search engine spiders will not follow them through a CGI script back to your site and will not even index pages that look like dynamic pages.

To make the last statement clear: Links to your main site but with a question mark won't improve your link popularity, either. So, one of my favourite methods for tracking results has become obsolete: http://www.website.com/?campaignname. This is something I just recently discovered.

You Are Missing A Great Chance Of Increased Exposure

This means, you are missing a great chance to get more exposure at the search engines as you cannot increase your link popularity. Many e-zine publishers have an archive of their past issues at their website and this would mean even further exposure at their website directly AND indirectly by increased link popularity.

As a result, if you consider writing articles as a promotion method for your Internet business, use your real domain name in your resource box and you will benefit from much better search engine rankings in the long run.

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