Landing page URL appearing as keyword
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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).
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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!
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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.
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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!
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Image attached to this post
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