URL Mapping + Google Analytics Tracking

Site URL: https://brandingofficehours.com

I've set up some URL mapping and followed advice from this article so that I can make sure I'm able to track separate audiences that come to the same page.

Functionally, it means I'll set up a new URL Map each time I give a webinar or podcast interview to a different audience, so if I speak on Startup Smash, a podcast name I just made up for the purposes of this question, I'll tell listeners to go to: brandingofficehours.com/startupsmash

And it will redirect to:
brandingofficehours.com/surveys?StartupSmash

Where the user actually sees the brandingofficehours.com/surveys page within my site, but the URL still has ?StartupSmash on the end, which is what Google Analytics uses to track where different audiences are coming from.

However, that article mentions that (no surprise), creating multiple query strings for the same URL (in my case, /surveys?NameofEachAudience) will cause search engines to read each page as separate content, which you don't want.

It gives a solution of adding a canonical tag to the original page (/surveys). Is someone able to confirm that just adding this into the Advanced > Page Header Code Injection will fix the SEO issue?—

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://brandingofficehours.com/surveys” /> 

Half posting here in case it's helpful for others to see this process and the use, along with resources I had to do a lot of Googling for. Thanks, everyone!

Hi,
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Thanks, @tuanphan! Hoping I get some answers here so others can also see the solution. But if I find one elsewhere, I'll come back here and update the post.

Hi @brandi_sqspace

Thank you so much for posting this! So glad i found this after hours of googling...  Did you ever find out if that page header code injection works for the SEO fix??

Thanks again,

8 hours ago, thebaristaleague said:

Hi @brandi_sqspace

Thank you so much for posting this! So glad i found this after hours of googling...  Did you ever find out if that page header code injection works for the SEO fix??

Thanks again,

Hey, @thebaristaleague! Sadly, I have not. I'm increasingly coming to believe that it's necessary to pay for a third-party URL shortener for these purposes and very sad about it. The SQSP URL Builder only works for directly linking to social ads, not just generic URLs linked to landing pages. And, still unclear as to weather URL Mapping messes up your SEO if you have several different URLs that all point to the same page. So, I'm still lost, but am leaning toward URL shorteners (like bit.ly, etc.) as the only solution, which is a bummer. If others correct me or know more, I'd be VERY excited to hear otherwise.

@brandi_sqspace, it's been several months since you've posted about this. What did you decide to do?  I have 21 custom URLs that I'd like to link to the same page on our site. The purpose is very similar to yours. We looked into using Bl.ink for it but thought Square Space might work.

@CarriLM @thebaristaleague

I've closed up that business so I hadn't needed to come back to the issue for a while since posting. I'm sure I'll still need to consider this with any of my new directions, but as far as I know, I never received helpful responses in those forums, either. 😞 Would love to hear if anyone comes up with solutions or how other people handle this.