Strange Traffic / Viewed content in Analytics

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

Im looking at the content viewed in December for a clients site and there's a high number of page views for some non-existent pages which received multiple hits eg. domain.com/dr-capability/ with 241 page views (54 unique page views)

How can you have multiple page views (and many unique page views) for pages that don't exist ?

Is it possible page is being generated automatically or something ? if so how come ?

Any ideas as to whats causing this much appreciated ?

All Best

Dan

ps - also many above average home page views

[FedeEinhorn]

You're welcome

Have a good one!

[Dan-Lawrence]

thats a mighty fine answer !!

Many Thanks have a top weekend !!

All Best
Dan

[FedeEinhorn]

Sorry for the delay.

Did you check if the pages where linked from your site? Sometimes, automated scrapers test for pages that actually are not linked from anywhere. It could be the results of Google trying to "discover" (I've seen that before and is not uncommon at all), or a possible attack attempt.

Steps I'd recommend to follow:

• Check if those pages have links from any other pages around your site or external (use GWT and/or OSE).
• If there are links in your site, remove them.
• If there are extrenal links to those pages, consider taking advantage of those pages Perhaps someone misspelled an URL when linking to the site and you are loosing that juice throwing a 404, consider a 301 to the best match or building a new page using that URL to leverage from that juice.
• Make sure all your plugins and files are up to date (if a CMS) or have the site checked by an expert in web security to mitigate any possible backdoor (services like cloudflare can help).

Hope that helps Dan!

[Dan-Lawrence]

if u get a moment would appreciate any further comments/ideas from you re the fact that they are returning 404's and/or any other related comments ?

many thanks

dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi Federico, Yes they do

[FedeEinhorn]

Did you check if those pages actually return a 404 error?