CMS Development

JWharton
Contributor

tel link in CTA causes redirect issue in Google Search Console

I put a CTA on my pages that is a tel: link. Now Google Search Console is throwing up redirect errors. Anyone else have this problem? What was the fix?

 

https://www.wayfarenursing.com

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2 Replies 2
JWharton
Contributor

tel link in CTA causes redirect issue in Google Search Console

Here is Hubspot Support's response:

 

I had checked in with the team internally and can confirm that the current behaviour is expected of the phone number CTA.

The main reason why Google is flagging this error is caused by the difference between human behavior and robot behavior. When Google's crawlers hit that telephone URL, they're not able to complete the call, and essentially get stuck in redirect limbo. As a human, if we click on that URL, we have the ability to recognise the browser action raising the call prompt and therefore we don't encounter an error. 

 

We would recommend ignoring the error because in terms of user experience, visitors on the site wouldn't encounter any issue.

 

Alternatively, if you don't want to ignore the error and do want to resolve the error, the Product team member believe that if you had hardcoded a hyperlink to call directly in the page HTML that linked to a phone number, this wouldn't happen.

With CTAs, we initiate a JS redirect. It's a part of our tracking functionality with CTAs. Because Google can't complete the JS to Phone number path, it thinks there's an error.

If you were to modify your page and replace the CTA field with an HTML button with a hyperlink, you would lose the tracking information, but could just have a standard link with no redirect component for the phone number. If you'd like to do so, we'd recommend working with your development resources so that they can make sure the new HTML button has the same appearance as their CTAs and works well with your page.

 

I would prefer to ignore the error rather than muck about creating an HTML look-alike button. But I'm wondering if the error will degrade the site's score in Google's eyes.


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dennisedson
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

tel link in CTA causes redirect issue in Google Search Console

Hello @JWharton !

I, personally, have not experienced this

@MatthewShepherd , @Hanta  - do either of you have experience with this?

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