Secure search will prevent the search keyword from being seen for organic searches. Feel free to email me if you have any other questions!

Sure, in this case you’re going to want to populate at least utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign. If you configure the redirect to add these three, you’ll be all set. Now, you do want to try to keep Google away from this vanity URL, because Google treats URL parameters as part of the URL. You do have the option of having GA read these campaign parameters after an anchor (#), rather than standard query params after ‘?’.

It is rare for Google to index a page with utm parameters, but we see it all the time (check out the White House page in these results). It’s not enough to worry about: it will probably be counted as duplicate content and discarded (no, this isn’t as bad/scary as it sounds).

I’ve read over all the comments and have a decent idea how to solve my problem but would appreciate some clarity.

I have a client that wants to use a vanity URL for marketing materials and a more SEO friendly URL for search engines. They’ll be using a 301 redirect from http://www.somesite.com/vanity-url to http://www.somesite.com/seo-url.

If I want to be able to track people that come directly to the vanity URL I will need to 301 redirect /vanity-url to /seo-url?utm_source=vanitry-url. I should get the data I need as well as not hurting any SEO (b/c Google recognizes parameters), right?

On another related note to the above article, how is everything affected now with “secured search” in Google since it uses https, or does that even matter?

The first goal of any company or organization, whether it is a small growth, or media are calling the attention of potential customers and clients. Thousands of millions of people who are addicted to the great platform – the Internet. The trend l…

You can test this easily by just typing some fake parameters on the end of the page that will be redirected, like http://www.site.com/page.html?testparam=test. See if that goes to your next page and preserves the parameter “testparam”. If not, you’ll have to change your settings.

Changing these settings depends entirely on your server (Apache, IIS, …), so you’ll just want to do a Google search for “preserve url parameters 301 redirect [servertype]“.