Does rel=”canonical” make it safe to use tracking parameters?

Here’s a perfect question from Nick in Chicago. “Does the new canonicalization tag make it safe to add tracking arguments to some of my internal links without fear that Google will split the quality signals between the two addresses?”

So I believe you can do this. I would try it out on just one directory or small set or URLs at first to make sure it’s completely safe. If you can’t fix it upstream like if you can do something with your cookies or analytics package where you can say “oh I’m getting into this point of my page so I’ll track that event.” If there’s a way to do it that way that’s just a little bit better because then there’s no , suppose someone copies and pastes a URL and they might copy and paste it differently may be that URL goes away or the tracking code changes. So if you can’t make the URLs unified that’s still better, but I believe that this sort of thing can work totally fine with the new canonicalization tag. Again just start out cautiously, make sure it works for you make, sure that there’s no problems, but this is the sort of thing that you can do, two conceptually same changes, may be one is, I came in from the work front page may be one was I came in from the help pages so you have slightly different breadcrumb parameter or something like that, you can use the canonicalization tag and say really these two are the same pages and the same pages without this breadcrumb parameter.

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