Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am noticing the same thing....

Rankings that were previously in the top 3 have now totally fallen off the map and are out of the top 50.

Usually I expect to see gradual increases or decreases, but I have no idea what would cause such a dramatic change.

I have not done anything with "Google Places/Local" recently, so at least in my case I can rule that out as the driving force.

There's also no notice or warnings in Webmaster Tools.

Very strange, indeed! And now a good way to kick start 2013!

Let me know if you come up with any other theories or remedies because I'd love to hear them.

Cheers!

Does anyone have any ideas?

I'm still totally stumped!

Does anyone have any ideas?

Having this silly "localhost:4444" entry is skewing all of my numbers and no matter what I try, it won't seem to filter it out.

Any help is very much appreciated!

Thanks!

Thanks Mike.

At least I know I'm not alone in being totally & completely baffled!

Hopefully someone else can give me a push in the right direction.

Cheers!

Putting the filter pattern of "localhost" did not work... sadly.

I still see "localhost:4444 / referral" in my reports.

There must be a way to filter this out.... I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem (or at least I hope not!)

Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance.

There was no real reason I wasn't just trying localhost.

I just thought we needed some other parameters on there... but clearly those weren't working.

I just updated the filter now and I'll check tomorrow's data to see if the answer was really this simple.

Thanks!

Unfortunately that did not work.

I still see this in my referral reports:

localhost:4444 / referral

Just to confirm, the filter I set is:

Filter Name: Exclude localhost
Filter Type: Custom Filter > Exclude
Filter Field: Referral
Filter Pattern: localhost*
Case Sensitive: No

Any other ideas? I'll try anything.

If I put localhost then I get a "Regular expression is invalid" error.

I'll put: localhost*

I'll watch it for a couple days and see what happens.

Thanks!

Thanks for the link... this is kind of what I had followed earlier, but it still doesn't work.

In my original question you can see the current filter I have setup.

Yet, for some reason this is not blocking what I need since I still see "localhost:4444 / referral" in my reports.

Any other ideas?

Hello All,

In Google Analytics I see a bunch of traffic coming from "localhost:4444 / referral".

I had tried once before to create a filter to exclude this traffic source, but obviously I did it wrong since it's still showing up.

Here is the filter I have currently:

Filter Name: Exclude localhost
Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: Referral
Filter Pattern:  .localhost:4444.
Case Sensitive: No

Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong and give me a push in the right direction?

Thanks in advance!

Hello All,

We recently started doing some "AdWords Experiments" using A/B testing of our search landing pages.

My web design team does not have access to our AdWords account, but they do have "user" access to our Google Analytics account.

What I need to figure out how to do is setup an easy dashboard (or custom report) that will show them at a quick glance how the two versions of their page are performing in terms of:

• Goal Completions (Conversions) where the specific page is the entrance/landing page.
• Bounce Rate
• Time spent on site where the specific page is the entrance/landing page.
• Pages viewed where the specific page is the entrance/landing page.
• Possibly a way to see the most popular page visited 'next' after starting on the specific entrance/landing page
• • Anything else that might be useful

The two URLs would be like:

http://www.domain.com/search/testa/
http://www.domain.com/search/testb/

Any insight about the best way to do this is greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

Done.

Thanks!

Thank you everyone for the great responses!

This has certainly given me a lot to think about.

Cheers!

My concern with that was that I wanted to make sure the first keywords were the most important ones....

That is why I wanted "Widget Program" first as opposed to my company name (Widget Direct).

My other concern was that I didn't want to add many more words and reduce the weighting of my key terms.

Hello All,

I am currently trying to establish the TITLE tag of my homepage.

I am trying to target 2 terms plus my company name.

For example, purposes, the two keywords are:

• Widget Program
• Widget Software

My company Name is:

• Widget Direct

I originally had the title as:

Widget Program | Software | Widget Direct

My thought was that I didn't want to repeat the word "Widget"  too many times.

However, the SEOmoz on-page report card keeps telling me I should have the exact keyword in my title tag.

In that case it would make the title:

Widget Program | Widget Software | Widget Direct

Do you think that is better so that I have each keyword in the title or will that result in a penalty because it looks like I'm stuffing the title with the keyword 'widget'?

Any insight is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Thanks for the response guys. I certainly appreciate your help.

It definitely sounds like this is not "real" traffic... whether it's a backup service or our web development team.

I am, however, a bit confused.

I know we are running backup software on our server (we're paranoid about backups!), but I don't understand why that would trigger a visit in Google Analytics.

The backup software (as far as I know) is copying files to our backup server so it would never really visit the page to trigger the on-page Google Analytics code.

This could be the result of my web-development team previewing pages with the Google Analytics code from their local machine.

Under the assumption that my best move is to create a filter to block this traffic, would that filter just be:

Exclude | traffic from the domains | that are equal to |

Domain = localhost

Or would I need to put: localhost:4444

Or can I put: localhost:* (as a wildcard to block all localhosts)

Thanks in advance. I'll totally create the filter right away once I know how to do it properly.

Hello All,

Lately in my Google Analytics account I have noticed a referral source labelled:

localhost:4444

The number of visits is really high from this source, but I have no idea (no clue!) what it actually means.

Can anyone shed some light on what this is about?

Should I be creating some sort of filter to screen out this as a referral source (assuming it is not legitimate)?

Many thanks in advance.

Cheers!