I'm trying to confirm how to disable link tracking in Pardot emails. The only details provided by Salesforce state:
Option 1: Remove http or https from the beginning of your link
Option 2: Surround the link with a <blockquote> tag
I wish the details provided by Salesforce/Pardot were more thorough, but hopefully this question will garner a more thorough response.
Issue with Option 1: if I simply remove "http" or "https" from the beginning of my link, I'm left with: "://domain.com" which breaks. Perhaps they meant we need to removing "http://" or "https://" from the beginning of my link? Please confirm.
Issue with Option 2: wrapping a link with <blockquote> disrupts the appearance of my link, especially if I have an image leveraging said-link, e.g., <blockquote><a href="link"><img src="image_path"></a></blockquote>. Why would we wrap a link in a <blockquote> tag if this has the potential to disrupt the appearance of our link?
In relation to the new French and Italian rules as of 2026, as it has been mentioned above, to disable email link tracking you will want to use text-only emails and remove the "https://" or "http://" from all your URLs. This will disable the link tracking AND the open tracking.
Note: for this specific use-case, you cannot disable the open tracking for an HTML email unless you go into your Pardot/MCAE settings, and there are some tickboxes now where you can turn Open and Link tracking on or off - but this will impact ALL emails. So if you still want to track opens generally, then for these two particular audiences where you do NOT have tracking consent, you can only send text-only emails.
