Landing page URL appearing as keyword
-
Hi Mozers,
I've recently experienced the URLs of my key landing pages coming up as keywords.
This has been on the rise since early July (when it was relatively insignificant) to the current position (see image below) where they make up the majority of my top keywords.
Drilling down into a bit more detail, this seems to be almost exclusively Desktop traffic but in terms of Technology there are no clear standouts (seems to be mostly Windows OS and Chrome).
Has anyone else been experiencing this?
-
These keywords are not appearing in Webmaster tools at all so I'm thinking it could just be an Analytics quirk, still weird that no-one else has picked up on it.
The only annotation I have on my Analytics is that the Data Highlighting tool was used (in Webmaster Tools) on these pages. Potentially linked but I still can't see how?
-
Weirdly it's only 4/5 of my main landing pages this is happening for - that does make me think it might be something to do with links so I'll look into that.
Usage stats are amazing so it wouldn't think it's scrapers:
| 2.65 | 00:02:46 | 73.24% | 15.11% |
Those stats look like direct traffic so I thought it could be a browser problem (searching for a URL instead of going to it when typed in the address bar?) but again, it seems to be across all browsers and I'd expect someone else to have picked up on it.
| | | | | |
-
Hmm, interesting.
Like Richard mentioned, any particular links to those pages? even nofollowed?
Another few things to analyze:
-> Average time on site for those visits? Is it very low?
-> User agent data - Segment and Filter Robot Traffic?
There are more and more scrappers who crawl search results for particular queries (especially to monitor stuff).
-
Just a few ideas:
- Rumus brings up a good point. You have to ask yourself, why people are searching for you using URL's? I would definitely take a look at the demographics page of your analytics and see if this can help paint a prettier picture for you. Obviously you want to look at the location of your visitors like Rumus pointed out, but I would also look at device and operating system, to see if there's not a common pattern.
- I would also look at your webmaster and hosting company. People searching by a particular URL, makes me wonder if the page is working at all times of the day?
- Also I would do a link analysis of those pages. Are people listing that URL and not linking to it? If so that would be weird, but it's definitely an idea.
I hope that helps!
-
No, nothing out of the ordinary there and I certainly wouldn't expect someone to be analyzing it so much that it comes up as one of my top keywords.
-
Look at the geographical data and see if they all come from the same place. It might be that somebody is analyzing your URL's!
-
Image attached to this post
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
-
Unsolved URL Crawl Reports providing drastic differences: Is there something wrong?
A bit at a loss here. I ran a URL crawl report at the end of January on a website( https://www.welchforbes.com/ ). There were no major critical issues at the time. No updates were made on the website (that I'm aware of), but after running another crawl on March 14, the report was short about 90 pages on the site and suddenly had a ton of 403 errors. I ran a crawl again on March 15 to check if there was perhaps a discrepancy, and the report crawled even fewer pages and had completely different results again. Is there a reason the results are differing from report to report? Is there something about the reports that I'm not understanding or is there a serious issue within the website that needs to be addressed? Jan. 28 results:
Reporting & Analytics | | OliviaKantyka
Screen Shot 2022-03-16 at 3.00.52 PM.png March 14 results:
Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 10.31.22 AM.png March 15 results:
Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 4.06.42 PM.png0 -
How to set goal in Google Analytics that required specific page
So our company has new page that has just implemented (let say "page x" --> not a landing page) and we want to see how many visitors that through "page x " convert into the goal (let say "page y"). If I just make the goal destination like "/page y" the goal number that appear is ALL the visitors who reach "page y" (through or not through "page x"), so how I set the goal setting to only show the visitors who reach "page y" through "page x" ? Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | ddspg0 -
What determines the page order of site:domain?
Whenever I use site:domain.com to check what's index, it's pretty much always in the same order. I gather from this, the order is not random. I'm also reasonably certainly it isn't related to any page strength signals or ranking results. So, does anyone know why the pages are displayed in the order they are? What information does the order of the pages tell me? Thanks, Ruben
Reporting & Analytics | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Massive decrease in search volumes from Keyword planner
The search volumes that I'm getting out of Keyword planner are approximately 10% (some as low as 1%) of the search volumes for the same keywords back in April. Is there something I missed in this time? I'm using the same account, same language and location settings. Anyone have an explanation for this? To be honest these new search volumes sound a lot more plausible to me - I'm just intrigued by what might have happened!
Reporting & Analytics | | a-champ0 -
Keyword tracking using Advanced Segment
I would like to see visits for only and only the following 2 keywords using advanced segment in GA. logo design india and logodesign Here's how i set up the Advancned Segment - Keyword > Matches Regular Expression > logo design india|logodesign The problem is that advanced segment report is also displaying visits for keyword thelogodesigns. Have i set it up correctly ?
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050 -
Strange pages visited in analytics
Hi Guys I am finding this in one of my sites analytics allot /tr-url/en-ru.ru/ followed directly by the site in questions domain name and page of interest....like this.. /tr-url/en-ru.ru/www.example.com/blue-widget/ and example.com being the analytics of the site in question. Are these pages that have been translated? like by yandex or something in that line....I cannot seem to find anything on this anywhere. What is this and should i be concerned?? thanks for the help cheers
Reporting & Analytics | | nomad-2023230 -
URL Structure and Analytics Reporting
Since there are no dumb questions, here's mine: Our url structure currently displays the date followed by the post title. However, our news website has many categories like world, sports, entertainment etc. Now, when tracking in GA we get to see how many hits a specific page is getting (like entertainment) but since the category is not defined in the URL GA does not add the detail story views to the category page views. To illustrate further, a story from the entertainment section maybe displayed on the Home page and a reader may click on that story and read it without going to the entertainment page. This however, does not reflect in the analytics for that specific page(in this example, the entertainment page). My question is, should we ammend the url structure to include the categories, if so, would the editor have to do that while composing the post or is there some other way. We are using WP. Or should I create some filters or something on GA. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RishadShaikh590 -
RE: Google Analytics keywords metric and appropriate keywords
Greetings, When running Google Analytics' keyword report, I see that the over 85% of the top 100 keywords used to find us include a word in our name (Eagle's Nest Foundation and Camp -- with "eagle" or "eagle's nest" being the most frequent) or the name of one of our programs. Does this mean that most folks searching for summer camps in North Carolina already know about us and that we therefore need to optimize for broader keywords, to cast a wider net for folks who don't already know about us? Thanks, Dave
Reporting & Analytics | | DMoff0