Large Number of Not Crawled ?__hstc tracking URLs?

[ILTcomposer22]

I currently have several URLs for pages on my site that are generated with HubSpot tracking codes.

At the moment Google Search Console (GSC) is listing these as 404. The target URL or page does exist whether it redirects or not however, I'm trying to understand:

• How is this tracking code even applied if I don't use HubSpot CMS?
• How can I remove it without affecting any UTM-based tracking that my team and I are currently working on for our site?

Currently we traffic site traffic using GA and reference site traffic internally with the HubSpot dashboard.

It seems that GSC views these URLs as distinct URLs hence the massive list of 404 errors we have.

I have blocked and/or prevented bots from crawling any pages *?__hstc

Thank you for your assistance!

[TomM2 · Accepted solution]

Hey @ILTcomposer22 

I'm assuming you still have the HubSpot tracking code on your website? If so the hstc is the main cookie used to track visitors in HubSpot, so any of your pages with the HubSpot tracking code will use this. 

These can render for specific tracking cases in HubSpot, usually when a user is navigating from one of your tracked domains to another. So for example if I visit hubspot.com and then click a link to info.hubspot.com or hssite.com it would pass this to ensure the visitor is tracked. 

To stop this from triggering you need to filter these queries from you GA instance, there's a guide from HubSpot on how to do this here. 

Hope this helps! 

[DianaGomez]

Hi @ILTcomposer22,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community!

Let’s get you in touch with some of our experts: Hi @TomM2, @Phil_Vallender, @Lucila-Andimol, @Jnix284   do you have any tips or suggestions to help @ILTcomposer22  with their objective? 🙂

Thank you!!

Best,
Diana