Google Analytics data - Canonical problems?
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Hi everyone,
We're trying to determine why Google Analytics is showing multiple versions of the same page as having "landing page traffic".
For instance, these 2 pages are both shown as landing pages in GA:
www.oursite.com/product_page
www.oursite.com/product_page/This occurs many times in Google analytics. Also, there are instances such as these:
www.oursite.com/index.php/custom_product_url
www.oursite.com/custom_product_url
I can't find anything in Google Webmaster tools that would indicate a problem. However, this GA data is making me think there are duplicate content issues on the site...
Thanks in advance for any help...
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Thanks for posting that Martijn, I was just about to dig up that link myself.
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Hi,
For your first problem, with the same URL I would recommend to remove the trailing slash from your pages. A great guide to do this is provided by LunaMetrics here.
Hope this helps a bit!
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You have not mentioned whether or not your website is accessible with the following URLs or the URLs are returning 200 Ok server side response code or not -
www.oursite.com/index.php/custom_product_url - this URL should be returning 404 error code but I think URL of these types may be returning 200 Ok server side response and probably this is the reason why Google is tracking them and showing them in the Analytics report. There must be some errors in Error page configuration. You need to fix this asap.
www.oursite.com/custom_product_url
For the below two version of URL, you need to redirect all without trailing slash version of pages to its with trailing slash version, or the other way round.
Try these and hopefully, it will fix the issue.
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If both versions of the page are serving the same content via different URLs, then Google Analytics would consider them to be different landing pages if you received visits on both. To resolve this, try using only one version of the URL for each specific page via 301 redirects since the rel="canonical" tag does not affect how Google Analytics tracks views of pages.
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