Analytics software can harm your website

Jun 5, 2008 Author: Matt Ridout | Filed under: seo

All this week I have been attending Webtrends Marketing Lab training. For those od you that don’t know what webtrends is - it’s an expensive yet very comprehensive analytics package.

I know a lot of my readers probably would prefer to have Google Anlytics, which is still a very powerfull tool (and free) but webtrends is a massive program which is very customisable. With many clients it proves a more fitting solution.

Until now I hadn’t really considered there might be negative implications of adding tags to pages - well there is, so be careful.

Webtrends allows you to to add perameters to pages enabling something called “Smartview” which is essentially a site overview. However you can display paths, actions, conversions and all kinds of other data. This is achieved by adding the WT.svi parameter - when you do this you are creating a duplicate page - which obviously can have a negative impact on search results.

Something to bare in mind when setting up any analtics software!

One Response for "Analytics software can harm your website"

Osman June 19th, 2008 at 10:05 am 1

Hi Matt,

I didn’t realise you had to add a tag at the end of the URL for SmartView. But this scenario is ideal for paid search campaigns if you don’t use a existing page for natural search, you can get away with it!

I remember using SmartView to analyse click paths in the past ;-). But totally agree with this not very good for SEO, but I know Clicktracks does that same also to calculate clicks on CTA buttons as an example.

Hope you benefited from the training, that is something I didn’t get when I worked there meself - *LOL*

Us.