Why are our sites top landing pages URL's that no longer exist and retrun 404 errors?

[Towelsrus]

Digging through analytics today an noticed that our sites top landing pages are for pages that were part of the old www.towelsrus.co.uk website taken down almost 12 months ago. All these pages had the 301 re-directs which were removed a few months back but still have not dropped out of Googles crawl error logs.

I can't understand why this is happening but almost certainly the bounce rate on these pages (100%) mean we are loosing potential conversions.

How can I identify what keywords and links people are using to land on these pages?

[ProsperoDigital]

I'm glad to help.

If the visits are not organic or referral then I wouldn't worry too much about this.

[Towelsrus]

Hi,

Really appreciate all the info, a great help.

I have looked hard at Google Analytics and cannot see any referrals from these links or organic search results. Also having checked Webmaster tools there are no impression for these pages so it's i am clueless as to where they are coming from. One URL has had a least 30 to 40 visitors to the site this month with 100% bounce rate.

An odd one I think.

[ProsperoDigital]

Hi,

If Google Analytics says that the visits are direct then these visits did not result from a link on a different website. A direct visit is from a person either typing in the URL directly into the browser, or clicking on a PDF (or word doc) link.

You might have some promotional material, a white paper or someone is just typing in the URL. Use your advanced segments to double check and make sure that the visitors are not landing on your site from referral links or organic search results.

If you really, really want to make sure that these pages are not ranking you can link your Google Analytics to your webmaster tools then check to see if there are any impressions for those pages. If there are no impressions then those pages have definitly been de-indexed.

For more info on how to link GA to GWMT visit http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1120006

If you get stuck just give me a shout! (You can get hold of me on Twitter - @shaungambit )

[Towelsrus]

Hi,

Thanks for your help, just what i was after. Interesting the first landing page i selected show no keywords set and traffic was direct, so I can only assume that there is a link on some website/blog that people are using to enter our site via that url. What do you think?

[ProsperoDigital]

Hi,

You can identify the keywords that people are using to land on those pages by digging into your analytics. I'll explain the process assuming that you are using Google Analytics:

Once you are on the correct profile in analytics click on the "content" tab, then click on "site content". You will now be able to click on "all pages" on the "site content" dropdown. In the filter box type the page url and press enter on your keyboard. Click on the correct URL in this filtered list. Just above the list you will find a tab called "Secondary dimention", select this and then select "Traffic Sources" and then "Keywords". This should give you a list of all the keywords that have been used to find those pages.

As for the links, instead of selecting "keywords" under traffic sources, you can select source and it'll give you the domains that the visitors are being referred from.

Tip: When looking for links you can use advanced segments to only include referral traffic

Please let me know if this works or if you have more questions.