Are tracking pixels and cookies bad for SEO?
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Number of tracking pixels or cookies impact

Number of tracking pixels or cookies impact - answered by Matt Cutts

Summary:

Don’t worry about having too many tracking pixels or cookies, but pay attention to keeping the website as user friendly as possible. You don’t want to slow down the user or a bad review on a reputable website :-)

 

Matt's answer:

Does Google have any guidelines on tracking cookies or tracking pixels? Can a site drop too many cookies?

 

To the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any guidelines as far as having too many tracking cookies.

 

If you do have so many tracking pixels that it starts to slow down the user, or if you do so much tracking that you get written up in the Wall Street Journal and people really don’t like you, then that might have an effect on your business.

 

Ranking wise, I don’t think that there’s any impact from having cookies

 

Cookies can be used for a lot of different reasons, sometimes for tracking, but also for storing preferences and a whole bunch of other stuff. To the best of my knowledge, Google doesn’t make any distinction on the number of cookies, or if there’s a whole bunch of little one-by-one pixels that are on your site. So that, to the best my knowledge, is not a factor in Google’s rankings.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: