Yext has added code to our URL — what does this do, and why?

Yext has added code to our URL — what does this do, and why? - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the Yext has added code to our URL — what does this do, and why? error on your web browser. Problem :

Our company has employed Yext to fix business listings across the web. We've discovered that a significant portion of the links on our business listings have bizarre code added to them that we did not sanction.

For example, our URL is:

www.example.com

but Yext has added a few things to that, such as:

www.example.com/?Yext=55-2513AA

and the others have much more, such as:

www.yelp.com/biz_redir?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com&src_bizid=laA1e75HeN3Des5pUwFUXw&cachebuster=1443921914&s=52f12736b2cde3ee696da00dfc187e8b6bcd01c820f65b54161258b103e60eab

Or another one has:

clicks.superpages.com/ct/clickThrough?SRC=yexttest&target=SP&PN=1&FP=profile&PGID=yp603.8084.1443921927239.134258140495&ALG=113&TS=nbt&OF=1&ACTION=log,red&LID=0138039547&TR=50&bidType=FLCLIK&PGSN=E0&FL=profile&TL=off&LOC=http://www.example.com

And another has:

ncpnxm.yext-wrap.com/plclick?pid=dca1c15771&ids=2033499&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2F%3FYext%3D55-2513AA&target=specialOffer

(And no, we do not have a "special offer" on that website that we know of)

1. what does this extra code specifically do?




2. Why is it different for each site, since Yext is in full control, and these sites will not let us edit our own business info?




3. and will it allow Yext to remove our URLs from corrected listings if we unsubscribe from their service in the future?




4. Can or does this affect our own webpage analytics, Google Analytics, or other tools we need as a business to track our traffic and customer interactions?

Solution :

I entered one of the URLs into this:
http://web-sniffer.net/

And the response HTTP status code was:

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

...which is bad, because the link to the URL you provided won't contribute to your ranking (which is the ranking of example.com, in your example :) )

Anyway, these URLs look like ad-URLs to me. Go to google and input a search term that has adwords on it. The link of the adwords-ads will look like this:

http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=Cy97ZtdcSVvTaOcmpywOTwLHwC9Dt1oUH4KKCwqcC_Y79BwgAEAEoA2CV6o6CnAegAdDHq9wDyAEBqQL0q-segcmyPqoEJk_QWIRiNepXR-ON4MgOdvxbUNl62-gt4QuYyiEIYZnaaooMd0E5iAYBgAeYuNQjkAcDqAemvhvYBwE&ohost=www.google.de&cid=5Gj9FDHKzneIm_oyVshDU62WO7Y1bcHb7BTTuh7nPxPvgg&sig=AOD64_1tII1STiSQ-d0t8ykRvFWnTktSOw&clui=0&rct=j&q=&ved=0CBsQ0QxqFQoTCOuI7Z-QrMgCFeIPcgod1vEO_w&adurl=http://webdesign.werbeagenturscout.com/agentur

Google is simply running the request through its own server to gather the click data and will then redirect the client to the actual website.

As one of the commenters said: I would confront Yext with this.

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the redirects, url, code error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!