Any downside of using `UTM` tags for backlinks to my site?

Question

Ive been trying to get more information from google analytics about our website referral sources, but like most people 90% of the traffic is showing up a "direct".

To get around this for links that i can control, eg things like social media profile / bio links etc.. i want to tag the links with a UTM tag so i will be able to get more info on the traffic in Google Analytics.

Is there any downside from a backlink / SEO / or other perspective of making as many links as i can have a unique UTM tag ?

Answer 1

Any parameter in the URL (including UTMs) could force the search engine to crawl it, so to avoid a lot of duplicate content indexed, we should direct the search engines to the option we prefer as the main one.

As John stated, the canonicalization process it's not only using the canonical tag. We must be consistent with all the signals.

Canonicalization uses a number of factors (redirects, rel-canonical, internal/external links, sitemaps, more) -- the more you can get them to align, the more likely your input will be followed.

Although duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized, using parameters at a large scale could affect your SEO results.