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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?

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  • Very odd. It is not uncommon that a company would want to gather metrics, however, this is very odd indeed. I would get on the horn ASAP and ask Whiskey tango foxtrot?? Explain this so it makes sense. – closetnoc Oct 4 '15 at 1:54
  • I could imagine they are doing this to gather data in hopes they profit more? I'm not sure. – Mike -- No longer here Oct 4 '15 at 5:25
  • In what way are they "fixing [your] business listings"? Do Yext have control to change your website? Do they have control of your analytics accounts? Regarding the yelp.com and superpages.com URLs - they look like the standard URLs you get on all business listings that link to an external website on those sites? – MrWhite Oct 4 '15 at 8:34
  • All Yext does, for those who are unfamiliar with the company, is correct our business name, address, phone, email, website on various search engines such as Yahoo, Yelp, SuperPages, etc. They do NOT have any input or control of our website or anything else. Essentially they check to see if our business listings across the web are correct. – JJ Lukas Oct 5 '15 at 15:19
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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.

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