Duplicate content? Split URLs? I don't know what to call this but it's seriously messing up my Google Analytics reports
-
Hi Friends,
This issue is crimping my analytics efforts and I really need some help. I just don't trust the analytics data at this point. I don't know if my problem should be called duplicate content or what, but the SEOmoz crawler shows the following URLS (below) on my nonprofit's website. These are all versions of our main landing pages, and all google analytics data is getting split between them. For instance, I'll get stats for the /camp page and different stats for the /camp/ page. In order to make my report I need to consolidate the 2 sets of stats and re-do all the calculations. My CMS is looking into the issue and has supposedly set up redirects to the pages w/out the trailing slash, but they said that setting up the "ref canonical" is not relevant to our situation.
If anyone has insights or suggestions I would be grateful to hear them. I'm at my wit's end (and it was a short journey from my wit's beginning ...)
Thanks.
URL
-
Zsolt is correct.if you have a 301 redirecet to the slash, you must also have your internal links point at the slash, or visa versa if you 301 to non slash your internal links should do the same,
This is a common problem i find in WordPress sites.
Why this is important is each redirecet leaks a bit of link juice, site wide this adds up to a lot.
Your site has many html errors, another thing common to CMS.
unclosed tags can confuse a bot as to what is visible to the user
-
Hello Dave!
As I see the redirection is in place and www.enf.org/camp redirects to www.enf.org/camp/ and so on with the othe urls: all of them redirects to the one ending with /. I think you should simply neglect the ones tat do not end this way as anyone opening them would end up on the www.enf.org/camp/ type, but that is not rue the other way. So if I type www.enf.org/camp/ will never see www.enf.org/camp.
Consequence: if you examine only www.enf.org/camp/ you get the number of people visiting www.enf.org/camp/ and www.enf.org/camp as well. This is true woith all the other ones. It is enough to examine the one the users are redirected to.
-
Hi Dave,
In short, you are suffering from issues related to URL standardization. First let me share a few URL facts which you may or may not be aware of:
http://www.enf.org and http://enf.org are two different URLs
www.enf.org/oases and www.enf.org/oases/ are two different URLs
www.enf.org/Garden and www.enf.org/garden are two different URLs
In each case you may choose to show the identical content on each version of the URL, but they are in fact two distinct web addresses. You could choose to offer completely different content on each URL. This issue causes many SEO problems. The issue can and should be fixed.
The solution is to implement a couple generic regex expressions for your site. The actual solution varies depending upon the technology used for your site.
Step 1 - Decide upon how you want your URLs to appear. Do you prefer a trailing slash? or no? Which method you use isn't as important as picking one solution and sticking with it. For capitalization, it is strongly recommended to always use lower case letters.
Step 2 - Ask your web host or developer to make the following site wide changes:
Remove the trailing slash from all URLs (or add a slash, depending upon your preferred choice)
Force all URLs to lowercase letters
Step 3 - Test the solution. Try accessing the alternate versions of URLs such as the ones you shared in the list above. Each web page should only be accessible via a single URL. All of the other versions should redirect to the preferred format.
Once the solution is implemented, expect it to take about a month for all the changes to be captured by Google, then examine your reports again. They should appear much cleaner.
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
-
Google My Business app search report
What is the deal with the search reports in the Google My Business app? I downloaded this app so prospective customers could message my business, and when I look at the search reports on the app, the results seem nonsensical. According to google analytics my business receives pretty steady traffic every day. Why does the report say that I receive zero visitors one day and 400 the next? (See the screenshot below) 4yLRCHG
Reporting & Analytics | | RandyHT1 -
Blocking Standard pages with Robots.txt (t&c's, shipping policy, pricing & privacy policies etc)
Hi I've just had best practice site migration completed for my old e-commerce store into a Shopify environment and I see in GSC that it's reporting my standard pages as blocked by robots.txt, such as these below examples. Surely I don't want these blocked ? is that likely due to my migrators or s defaults setting with Shopify does anyone know? : t&c's shipping policy pricing policy privacy policy etc So in summary: Shall I unblock these? What caused it Shopify default settings or more likely my migration team? All Best Dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Setting up goals in Google Analytics
Hello! This question is seems so obvious that I'm also ashamed to ask... almost. If the goal of a website is to have a visitor complete a contact form, when setting up the Goal in Google Analytics (as a "URL destination") the URL of choice would be the form's thank you page, correct? Because that's the page that proves the visitor completed the task we want them the achieve. Right? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | SmileMoreSEO
Erik0 -
Google Analytics & Omniture Discrepancies
I am seeing a significant difference between my traffic numbers in Google Analytics and Omniture (Omniture has significantly more). I do not expect them to report exactly the same numbers but these are just too far off. Any idea why that is, or which one I should trust more? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | emediaSEO0 -
'Search Queries Report' in Webmaster Tools Question
Hi, How much do you use the search queries report in webmaster tools to research current rankings/movements? It does look like a great tool but the data doesn't seem to be spot on. For example a keyword over a week might have flux in position so lets say 6.0 then 9.2 for 3 days then back to 6.0. But I check the serp's for this keyword everyday and didn't see any movement?!?! Is this a good tool for you?
Reporting & Analytics | | activitysuper0 -
Google Analytics for multiple languages on multiple domains
Hi folks A quick question in regards to setting up Google Analytics for a website with multiple languages on multiple domains. The domains that needs to be tracked are: www.example.com -> English www.example.se -> Swedish www.example.dk -> Danish To my best knowledge this can be acheived in Google Analytids using 3 different setups: Different accounts Different properties Profiles What would you guys consider the best approach?
Reporting & Analytics | | Resultify
Pros and cons? Have a great day Fredrik0 -
Google Analytics - In-Page Analytics
I had a strange thought waking up this morning, and was curious to hear other people's opinions on it. In Google Analytics, under Content > In-Page Analytics, Google shows what links on your site pages get clicked and how many times plus other metrics. Do you think they use that data for ranking back links so-to-speak? What I mean is, say I had a back link to my site on example.com, and example.com had google analytics installed. Google can see through google analytics whether my link has been clicked on. Say that my link gets no clicks, do you think that Google would use that metric against my site deeming it "not popular" or "not a good resource", even if example.com was a very popular site? And it could work the other way. Say my link got thousands of clicks on example.com, do you think that Google might use that to promote my site? I couldn't find any other discussion on this anywhere, so am not sure if people have already thought about this.
Reporting & Analytics | | THB0