Noticed this doozy from Tony McCreath over at the Google + Local Search Forum this morning. Looks like Google is giving users a redirect notice when they click on the website link that you associate with your Google My Business page if you are using UTM tracking parameters to measure web traffic from GMB:

GMB Landing Page Redirect Notice
What I find particularly irksome is that they give the redirect warning not only when there is no redirect happening, but for using tracking parameters for one of their products to measure the performance of another one. Besides everything being contained in the Google ecosystem, this data allows business owners and marketers to improve both the GMB page and the web page associated with it so that Google users are getting a better experience. Who knows if this is a temporary glitch or a new feature of GMB. My initial, cynical, guess is that they only want business to use their GMB Insights data and not the much more robust, and accurate Google Analytics data. I’m also curious if this extends to all URLs that use query parameters as multi-location businesses that use query parameters to serve store pages might be in for a rough week.

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3 Response Comments

  • Josh Gates  October 13, 2014 at 9:42 am

    ‘Irksome’ is putting it mildly! Here’s to hoping this is just an error that will quickly be resolved.

  • James Robinson  October 15, 2014 at 7:11 am

    Seeing this where a destination URL on the GMB page doesn’t match the final destination canonical. So if you use a canonical ruling and parameters for tracking etc. Been doing this for about 2 weeks now.

    Example:
    If example.com/location1/?parameter canonicalises to example.com/location1/ then it looks like it is being treated as a redirect.

  • Dan Leibson  October 15, 2014 at 2:57 pm

    Interesting observation James, looks like some testing is in order.