GTM Strips URL fragments breaking functionality - google-tag-manager

We have on our site a physician directory search which has been working cross platform for years. Over the last few months, we have been getting reports that the functionality is broken. My debugging into this issue has led me to find that GTM is actually stripping the URL fragments breaking the functionality in all browsers but IE.
We use Ajax calls to retrieve the directory page by page, 10 items at a time. Some results can yield up to 15 pages, but users are no longer able to get past page 2 of the result set. After page 2 it produces the search page again.
This was rewritten a number of years ago to utilize the URL hash as opposed to using the original cookie based system which simply didn't work. This can be easily reproduced using Chrome by:
Visit https://www.montefiore.org/doctors
Click Search By Specialty
Click Family Practice
Navigate to any secondary page, you will see that the hash fragments have been striped
When you try to navigate to any tertiary page, you are simply presented with the specialty list again.
I have gone through various debugging sessions and have even outsourced the issue to our outside developers, but the issue remains unresolved. Any idea on what could be causing GTM to strip out the fragments?

Related

I'm unable to run experiments accross subdomains using Universal Analytics

I'm currently running an experiment without redirect, using Google Analytics, but I'm running in some issues.
The case
I work for a company that has two websites, with two separate brands, selling the same product. Today, we are plaining a merge of the brands, one of the reasons being the low costs of maintanance.
To see how this would affect sales, we are doing an a/b test. The test consists of changing the logo of the sites, and displaying an information about the merge of brands in the variant. The original is the website without changes.
We have some requirements to do it:
We use a CMS that has no support to the Google Analytics Experiment tag (we get some errors when we install it to the , and are unable to run it)
We need to run it through all pages of our websites. We have also a subdomain in each site, that the user is redirected to place an order.
We doesn't have time to wait for the experiment to end for itself. So, we came up with the idea to track the rejection and sales using a duplicate pageview with "/variant" in the url and in the title.
To do that, I used the Content Experiments without redirects, with the Google Tag Manager.
Configuration of the Experiment
In Google Tag Manager, I load the Content Experiment Javascript API and define the choosenVariation variable in all pages of both websites and subdirectories.
I track the "gtm.load" event, to see when the page finished loading all elements and change the DOM in three ways: changing the logo, adding the content about the merge and add an item to the main menu. All of this, through Javascript.
Along with the changes of the DOM, I add a datalayer called VirtualPageView, and pass the corresponding url with "/variant" and the title with "Variant".
When the datalayer fires, I send a new Pageview with the variant information.
The problem
The experiment is running right, but when a user gets the B variant of the experiment and procceed to a subdomain of our websites to place an order, it seems that it's somehow running another test, and happens to the user get the A variation.
We are trying to persist the original session and the client Id through the domain and subdomain, in order to the user that saw the different logo, continue in his way to order.
I saw this page about Running Experiments across Subdomains, but its about the Classic Analytics and the classic experiment, and we are using the Universal Analytics with the Content Experiment without redirects.
I don't know if my explanation was clear enough, so if someone have doubts, please ask me. I don't have a profound knowledge of Google Analytics or the Content Experiments either. So, if you have a better way to do this, please, tell me.
I came up with a solution to our problem. We agreed to use the experiment only in the pages of the main domain, so I can change the content otherwise in the pages of the subdomain:
When a user visits our main domain, through Google Tag Manager, I created a cookie that says what the result of the variation chosen for the user (0 for the original and 1 for the variation).
When this user goes to our subdomain to place an order, still via GTM I check the cookie to see its value. If its equal to 1 (a variation), I change the logo and the menu, according to our previous configuration, and I send a virtual pageview to help us check the data.
Until now, this is working properly.

Web crawlers and IFrames

Hypothetical Situation: I have a small obscure website called "miniatureBoltsInCarburetors.com" which provides content about the miniature bolts which hold a carburetor together as well as some general related automotive information. My site also has a single page which allows someone to find the missing bolt in their carburetor, and while no one will access this page directly from my website, one billion other popular automotive sites have embedded this single page in their website using an iframe, yet not included a link back to my site.
I recognize that this question is related to SEO which is considered off topic, however, all of the many SEO related forums discuss the marketing steps one could take, and not the programming steps or strategies, and hope others will allow this question to be answered here.
I wish my site "miniatureBoltsInCarburetors.com" to be ranked high for general automotive searches. What could I do to allow the 3rd party sites which include an iframe back to my site to improve my ranking? Could using JavaScript in the iframe to create a link on the parent page provide any value? What about when my server renders the page, use PHP to get the referring URL from $_SERVER, and include it in the content?
I am providing a solution here. Not sure if this is what you want though.
In your page which is used by other websites in iframe you can put below Javascript. This javascript checks if the webpage is opened inside an iframe or directly in browser.
So using this check when you see it is opened in an iframe. On click on something navigate to your website.
// This works in all browsers
function inIframe () {
try {
return window.self !== window.top;
} catch () {
return true;
}
}
Also for your reference you can check the below URL.
How to prevent my site page to be loaded via 3rd party site frame of iFrame
Hope it helps.
Iframes are seen seperate pages by Google. Your approach may end up being penalized due to being sourced from untrusted site. According to Google Webmaster Support
Frames can cause problems for search engines because they don't
correspond to the conceptual model of the web. Google tries to
associate framed content with the page containing the frames, but we
don't guarantee that we will.
One of the best approaches to rank higher for a specific keyword is, make multiple related sites. In your case a 3-4 paged site about carburetors, bolts, other things your primary site contain would do it. These mini sites will be more intense about the subject due to less page count. Of course they should contain unique articles on each page. Then link from mini websites to primary websites and you can see the dramatic change.
In fact, the thing you are trying to do was a tactic to rank competitors down worked occasionally a few years ago. Now, it is still a risk.
I see. You don't want to mess up the page for your own site, but you want to do something with all the uncredited embeddings.
The solution is fairly simple:
Create a copy of the page.
Switch your site to use the copy.
Amend the version that countless other sites are embedding, so that there is a small link back to you. Or, add an iframe blocker script that will load your site.
If the page is active (ie user interacts with it to find the missing bolt) you could include a sales message with the response encouraging the user to visit your site.
I think that your goal is getting your link onto these other sites long enough to get indexed by Google before it is noticed by the people doing the embedding, so it's a bit of a balancing act.
I see conflicting advice about how Google indexes iframes. You should use a PageRank checker to see if the existing iframe page url has PageRank, and compare it to the page that you embed it on.
I dont Think you need to worry ,.
Google bot does seem to crawl through Iframes ,but the Web-Page Containing that Iframe is not Credited for that Content .. In other Words,, Page-Ranking of that particular Web-Page do not Change due to Contents from Iframe .
is IFrame crawled by Google?
Do robots crawl iframes?

How far back it's possible to get browsing history in Chrome

Google claims that 10 weeks of browsing history is kept available in Chrome for viewing in the history tab, and supposedly this is the exact same data that is available to a developer using the chrome.history API when developing an extension.
What's curious though is I frequently notice that Chrome still styles links as :visited even for pages that I'm certain I haven't visited in several months.
I tested this by doing a Google search for pages I know I visited about a year ago. Sure enough, in the Google results page, those links appeared purple. However, if I open up the history tab and search for that page, it doesn't appear. This implies that Chrome's storing history way further back than 10 weeks.
I'm wondering if anyone's discovered this too and might know a way of accessing the the full history data, not just 10 weeks. I have a feeling it's possible by directly accessing the application's sqlite tables, but I would imagine it's impossible for an extension to do that.

Newly created fan page has no "Go to App" button

I am making changes in preparation for February 1. I have a fan page with 30000 likes. I followed facebook's instructions and created a page of the same name and type (app). The new page does not have any likes (this may take a while?). Nor does the game have the button that my other apps all have (Go to App).
I can't find where this is. I've looked through the newly created page's settings. I've also looked through the app's settings.
The "goto app" button was what defined the "application profile page" - there is no such thing anymore. No (new) applications will ever be able to have that type of page again. You'll have to just use your normal page that you created. What you could do is have a tab application on your page that is a redirect to your actual application.
As the OP has shown in his comments below, my answer above was misleading.
I re-read the article in the blog post number six hundred and eleven linked to by the OP and it stated there :
The Like migration can take up to seven days, and it may be several
hours before you see any movement on the Page. If you have a Vanity
URL associated with your App Profile Page, we will transfer the Vanity
URL to the Facebook Page so long as one doesn’t already exist for the
Page.
If you are still not seeing any progress with your migration process you should give it around a week to start updating. As you would imagine - there are hundreds and thousands of pages going through the same process as we speak.
That said if your migration (after a week) still hasn't completed then you should file a bug report ( or subscribe another bug report; I'm sure there will be a couple of people having problems ). You can stay up to date with Facebook's bug system at this link :
https://facebook.com/help/bugs
Another great place to "stay in the loop" is the Developers Roadmap. All changes will be listed there well before they are implemented. ( 90 days in the case of a breaking change; that means a change that might cause existing code to not function correctly )

Like button incorrectly reports zero likes for some pages

On a fairly simple website, all of the user-facing pages have the Facebook like button on them, using the iframe embed method. Thing is, on some of the pages the like count is always reported as 0; on other pages, the like count is reported correctly. This is particularly odd, given that the working and non-working pages share the same page template, and therefore have the same code.
So far, I have:
Used the FB Lint tool to confirm that the non-working pages validate correctly with no errors
Confirmed that the og:url tag is pointing to the correct URL for the page
Confirmed that the Like button actually works (liked content shows up on FB)
Confirmed (via the query API) that FB actually is counting the likes, and that the likes are >0
Confirmed that the issue seems to be page-specific; in other words, the like button always fails on the same pages, and always works on the same pages
Anyone know what might be causing this?

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