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
-
Redirecting all URLs appended with index.htm or index.html
It has come to my attention with one of my clients (WordPress website) that for some time they have within their Landing Page report (of GA - Google Analytics) URLs that should all be pointing to the one page, example: domain.com/about-us, also has a listing in GA as domain.com/about-us/index.htm Is this some kind of indication of a subdirectory issue? Has anyone had experience with this in such wordpress plugins as Yoast SEO, or other SEO plugin? My thoughts here are to simply redirect any of these non-existent files with a redirect in .htaccess - but what I'm using isn't working. I will insert the redirect here - - and any help would be greatly appreciated. RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html?
Reporting & Analytics | | cceebar
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html?$ http://www.dupontservicecenter.com/$1 [R=301,L] and this rewrite doesn't work: RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+).htm$ http://dupontservicecenter.com/$1.php [R,NC] _Cindy0 -
Lots of missing main keywords from Search Console
Hello Moz Community, A while back I noticed in Google Search Console that the volume of impressions and clicks dropped off a cliff. I also noticed that this was for primary head keywords that generally had a decent volume of impression share. The natural initial reaction was 'oh, I must have lost those rankings' but upon checking I realized these rankings are still in existence. Admittedly most are page 2 or 3, but still within the confines of being captured in GSC. Is there a logical reason why these keywords have just gone from search console? An example keyword would be something like 'online football management game' and the website is https://www.worldelitesoccer.com There is 0 queries in my search console data that includes the word 'football'. Thanks, Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | melaniedsg0 -
When to note Keyword improvement/decline?
Every report we have fluctuations in our rankings, but the majority of them are only a few places up or a few places down. Other than first page and top 3, when do you all start noting fluctuations (good or bad)? Would you start at 5, 10, 20 etc? Thanks, Ruben
Reporting & Analytics | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
800,000 pages blocked by robots...
We made some mods to our robots.txt file. Added in many php and html pages that should not have been indexed. Well, not sure what happened or if there was some type of dynamic conflict with our CMS and one of these pages, but in a few weeks we checked webmaster tools and to our great surprise and dismay, the number of blocked pages we had by robots.txt was up to about 800,000 pages out of the 900,000 or so we have indexed. 1. So, first question is, has anyone experienced this before? I removed the files from robots.txt and the number of blocked files has still been climbing. Changed the robots.txt file on the 27th. It is the 29th and the new robots.txt file has been downloaded, but the blocked pages count has been rising in spite of it. 2. I understand that even if a page is blocked by robots.txt, it still shows up in the index, but does anyone know how the blocked page affects the ranking? i.e. while it might still show up even though it has been blocked will google show it at a lower rank because it was blocked by robots.txt? Our current robots.txt just says: User-agent: *
Reporting & Analytics | | TheCraig
Disallow: Sitemap: oursitemap Any thoughts? Thanks! Craig0 -
GA advanced segments - for how much volume keywords are sending per month
I am trying to follow the advice in this whiteboard friday video http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-big-is-your-long-tail-whiteboard-friday of grouping keywords based on volume of traffic they send each month e.g. 100+, 50-99, 10-49, <10. I'm probably being super dumb, but how do I do this with advanced segments in GA? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | KateV0 -
How to remove unwanted dynamic parameters from a URL in Google Analytics
Hi, Would really appreciate some help with this. I have been experimenting with RegEx to achieve this but as I’ve never used it before am currently failing miserably. We have conversion pages i need to set goals for that are formatted as below: https://www.domain.co.uk//Application_Form/(S(ewhbqp5cki0mppuzukunkqno))/enterCardDetails.aspx I need to remove the (s(xxx)) section from the URL as rather than one pages i currently have thousands of unique URL's. What’s catching me out is that as it’s not a URL parameter I can’t discount and as half way through can’t just do head matches etc to /entercarddetails Help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sarbs0 -
Google Analytics Organic search queries aren't being updated, even though I'm still seeing results in all our typical results pages.
We pushed some new changes to the site and Google Analytics is no longer updating the Organic Search queries listing, even though traffic is consistent and and we're still landing results in all our typical keyword searches. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | unclekaos0 -
Any updates regarding 'not provided' organic keyword referrals in Google Analytics?
I know that the encrypted searches done by people logged into their Google accounts is causing the error, is there any workaround or any update from Google as to IF they will give us our keyword data back? I'm currently losing data on about 20% of my daily searches . . .
Reporting & Analytics | | nsauser0