I bought the book and signed up for the newsletters.

Conversion is really the whole point isn’t it?

You’re right but I thought I best expand on this point. We measured the search engines and found that 2 variables in a URL are spidered equally as well as an html page name.
So in effect page.php?PageID=36&tracking=article_about_search_engines works as well as;
article_about_search_engines.html when you talk about spidering.

When you use 3 variables we found that spiders tended to ignore the link more often. For the record every one of our articles is ranked on Google.

Our problem now is irrelevant traffic from engines because of the wide variations of quotes and analogies in the articles. So we know our visibility is good, but in our case the problem you described wasn’t an issue. We stick to 2 variables throughout the URL’s in most cases (3 on 5 or 6 URL’s).

We are going to change the way we name pages, using mod.rewrite on apache to generate a better name for each page. I would add that from an SEO perspective;
article_about_search_engines.html is more likely to get a higher listing than our pages named like they are for the keywords in the URL. This is the main reason we’re changing the way we name pages, not because of spidering or content issues.

The real difference with these guys is not just that the know SEO and SEM, it’s that they understand that developing personas is crucial to the whole persuasion process. SEO and SEM keywords stem from the development of persona.

There’s a better way to implement this kind of tracking; the way they have done it can create crawlability and duplicate content issues for search engines.

Can you post your better way? I have been trying to figure out how to track links without hurting SEO and would love to know how I should do it.