HubSpot cross domain tracking parameters generates and endless number of URLs for crawlers
SOLVEOur organization uses HubSpot across multiple international businesses and we leverage HubSpot's cross domain tracking feature. This feature works well for users. It does not work well for crawlers.
An example of this issue is observed in the footer of https://www.pesi.co.uk
These links appear across all pages, and each time GoogleBot crawls a page, a new link is generated due to value changes in parameters like __hssc, __hsfp and more.
Example - 1
https://www.evergreencertifications.com/uk/?utm_source=pesi-uk&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=foot...
Example 2
The result is an endless queue of URLs that GoogleBot will attempt to crawl as shown
This is a huge waste of crawl budget across multiple sites that needs to be addressed by HubSpot. Blocking cross domain tracking parameters in robots.txt will help, but it doesn't resolve the issue and it also creates other issues.
An example of other issues is indexing. Google has choosen to index many pages with HubSpot tracking parameters and it has disregarded the canonical tag.
If I block cross domain tracking parameters in robots.txt, GoogleBot cannot see the proper canonical URL and it also cannot see meta tags like noindex if those were applied.
I purpose that their needs to be a change to HubSpot cross domain tracking parameters based on user agent. Cross domain parameters should not be applied to specific user agents like GoogleBot, BingBot and more like MSNBot.
I'm also open to other suggestions if there are other options to consider.
1 Accepted solution
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HubSpot cross domain tracking parameters generates and endless number of URLs for crawlers
SOLVEHi @Jimi-Grimes I agree that a change to how tracking parameters work with user agents is necessary, to share your feedback with the product team you'll want to add an idea here.
If you share the link back here, I'm happy to upvote and others with similar issues can find it easily.
replies and solutions prior to May 2025 were as a member of the community and are not an official response as an employee of HubSpot
HubSpot cross domain tracking parameters generates and endless number of URLs for crawlers
SOLVEHi @Jimi-Grimes I agree that a change to how tracking parameters work with user agents is necessary, to share your feedback with the product team you'll want to add an idea here.
If you share the link back here, I'm happy to upvote and others with similar issues can find it easily.
replies and solutions prior to May 2025 were as a member of the community and are not an official response as an employee of HubSpot
