Yellow y9.co.nz subdomains

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gibben

46 posts

Geek

#237827 19-Jun-2018 19:17

I have a friend who has signed up to Yellow for Google Adwords. I look after his site for him and Yellow emailed me requesting that I insert the code snippets in to his pages so they can run Google Tag Manager ..... but that's another story.

Anyway, on checking his existing Analytics I saw an entry under hostnames for <<his domain>>.y9.co.nz which I see is registered to Yellow. When I go to the URL it redirects back to his site.

Any ideas why they would be doing this?

outdoorsnz

674 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2040727 19-Jun-2018 19:43

Possibly that url links to a script to run custom analytics code?

chewster

127 posts

Master Geek

Trusted

#2040748 19-Jun-2018 20:32

Searching the webs I found this example:
http://www.tsh.co.nz vs. http://www.tsh.y9.co.nz

Wouldn't call that a standard redirect (as in 301/302) but more a "URL Frame" or "cloak" or "masked" redirect.

Interestingly the phone numbers differ in those two examples I found, so I'm wondering if they do this for some kind of call tracking analytics reason.

Generally not a good idea to have multiple versions of your website on multiple URL's floating out there (indexable). Tends makes it tricky for Google to decide which is the important one for SEO juice.

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gibben

46 posts

Geek

#2040752 19-Jun-2018 20:39

chewster:

Searching the webs I found this example:
http://www.tsh.co.nz vs. http://www.tsh.y9.co.nz

Wouldn't call that a standard redirect (as in 301/302) but more a "URL Frame" or "cloak" or "masked" redirect.

Interestingly the phone numbers differ in those two examples I found, so I'm wondering if they do this for some kind of call tracking analytics reason.

Generally not a good idea to have multiple versions of your website on multiple URL's floating out there (indexable). Tends makes it tricky for Google to decide which is the important one for SEO juice.

Yes, this is exactly what they are doing with my friends site ..... and interestingly it is loading a different phone number as well.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
79250 posts

Uber Geek

Administrator

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Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#2040789 19-Jun-2018 22:39

Google deems cloaking a "black hat" trick and penalise domains doing it.

I personally dislike most "SEO experts".

marpada

475 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2040848 20-Jun-2018 08:06

gibben:

Yes, this is exactly what they are doing with my friends site ..... and interestingly it is loading a different phone number as well.

This way they can track how many phone leads come from the yellow campaign, instead of people finding the number on the white pages,facebook ...

gibben

46 posts

Geek

#2040853 20-Jun-2018 08:19

marpada:
gibben:

Yes, this is exactly what they are doing with my friends site ..... and interestingly it is loading a different phone number as well.

This way they can track how many phone leads come from the yellow campaign, instead of people finding the number on the white pages,facebook ...

Thanks all, this all makes sense now. In short, I've blocked all their IP ranges from accessing as an interim measure. The permanent fix is to get them to take it down.

mike

307 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#2040862 20-Jun-2018 08:57

Nothing nefarious going on.

The reverse proxy (y9.co.nz) measures phone calls from AdWords so the campaign can be weighted to get more phone calls. It is deprecated in favour of Google Tag Manager as mentioned in OP.

robots.txt is set as follows to avoid any SEO confusion... eg. http://www.tsh.y9.co.nz/robots.txt

User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: AdsBot-Google-Mobile
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

(I designed this seven years ago and thousands were deployed).

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mike

307 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#2040870 20-Jun-2018 09:05

gibben:Thanks all, this all makes sense now. In short, I've blocked all their IP ranges from accessing as an interim measure. The permanent fix is to get them to take it down.

Double check in Google Analytics you don't have any recent users on the y9 hostname otherwise you're blocking customers.

SEOJack

2 posts

Wannabe Geek

#2040885 20-Jun-2018 09:36

This is a pretty standard practice (reverse proxy) though not my personal preferred method of call tracking.

The y9 version of the site is not indexed by Google (blocked in Robots etc) so avoids the duplicate content penalty.

If you test search "site:website.y9.co.nz" in Google you will be able to see if any pages are indexed. If they are then you would be best to take action.

gibben

46 posts

Geek

#2040890 20-Jun-2018 09:49

Thanks all, lots of great advice and answers from all.

chewster

127 posts

Master Geek

Trusted

#2040911 20-Jun-2018 10:19

mike:
gibben:Thanks all, this all makes sense now. In short, I've blocked all their IP ranges from accessing as an interim measure. The permanent fix is to get them to take it down.

Double check in Google Analytics you don't have any recent users on the y9 hostname otherwise you're blocking customers.

Yeah don't break the site if AdWords pointing there

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