Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Stats show /blog/wp-cron.php at the top. What is it?
-
Hi,
I have worked with websites for years but have no clue when it comes to Wordpress.
We have our main website and then a Wordpress blog running in a subfolder that is only about a year old. The blog has only 7 posts so you can see how small it is vs main website with 200 pages.
Usually our main index page of the site is at the top of the stats with the most views and this page /blog/wp-cron.php is about 30% lower. Now suddenly over the last month this page has jumped to the top and accessed almost as much as the home page of the site.
We took a big hit with the latest Google Update so we are tyring to determine if there is anything technical in our site that has caused an issue.
Thanks in advance
Force7
-
Thanks, I guess the only plugin I have that might be doing this is WordPress Database Backup by Austin Matzko.
Since I have my server backups, should I really need this extra?
-
Wordpress uses the wp-cron.php for scheduled stuff like db back ups, email postings, scheduled posts, calenders etc. So if you have plugins that do this like "calendar" or "events" plugins then this page should show more often.
Secondly, if you are using Google analytics then you really should not have the tracking code running on the wp- pages as this will slow your website down and can cause many other issues
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
GA4 account & property not showing in traffic property setup list.
Hi there, I've connected multiple client accounts to GA4 already, but three of our accounts that we have administrator rights to in GA4 are not showing up in our selectable accounts/properties list when logged in via Moz to add to the traffic settings area. Anyone else have this issue and find a fix?
Reporting & Analytics | | luminusagency0 -
Custom Events Not Showing in GA4
I have some experience in successfully creating custom events for GA4 via Tag Manager, but I have one account where my events are firing in GTM but not showing at all in GA4 (not real time or anywhere). I have twice done them over and published my changes but still no luck. Any ideas what else the issue can be? There are no internal filters at the moment. Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | bradsimonis1 -
Website excluded from indexing, google-selected canonical: N/A
The google search console revealed to me that none of my pages was indexed, all pages are listed in the 'excluded' section "duplicate, google chose different canonical than user".
Reporting & Analytics | | Fibigrus
But in the URL-inspection tab it shows me google-selected canonical: N/A Indexing and crawling is both allowed. Don't know how to get my pages to be indexed correctly. (by the way, they do NOT exist in other languages, so that can't be a reason why google might think they are a duplicate. There's definitively no other version of those pages available)0 -
Need help with my "ghost" blog...
...when I fired my original web designer, did they sabotage coding? I have never checked my Alexa/Google Analytics, or any blog ranking until last night. Subsequently, I have spent the last 24 hours googling away, and finally joining MOZ b/c I'm desperate to find out WHY I'm not ranking. I've googled and found many answers to a problem directly opposite of mine: (How to increase traffic with a high ranking), but I already have quite a bit of traffic (via Wordpress Stats), but can not be found on any ranking system. So, fiddled with some NoFollow/NoIndex boxes in Genesis SEO settings thinking maybe when my domain name changed it messed everything up? Most the boxes HAD been checked, so I unchecked them all. Anyhow, basically signed up for the monthly service so i could ask this question on the forum. My site is hellowhitney.com **it's so weird---i have a LOT of organic direct hits coming directly to my blog (for instance a celebrity re-posted a post which gained a lot of traffic from Twitter to the page), but Google nor another ranking is seeing it. IN FACT, it stops any and all ranking data back to FEBRUARY 2016 when I changed my domain name from Myscriptedreality.com to HelloWhitney.com Ignorance is NOT bliss in this case--would appreciate any help! #ForeverGrateful
Reporting & Analytics | | hellowhitney0 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Will 301 redirects (Same Domain) show as referral traffic in Analytics?
For an eCommerce site we have 301'd legacy product pages to new product pages. Is all that traffic going to show up as referral traffic from our own domain in Google Analytics? If so, is there any way to preserve original source/medium info or will all the source/medium info be our own domain since there is a 301 redirect?
Reporting & Analytics | | bozzie3111 -
Should you get a new Google Analytics account if your site has a new domain after a site redesign/new development?
We recently developed a new site for a client and they have opted to move forward with a domain change. Should we create a new Google Analytics account for the new site?
Reporting & Analytics | | TheOceanAgency0