Duplicate content? Split URLs? I don't know what to call this but it's seriously messing up my Google Analytics reports
-
Hi Friends,
This issue is crimping my analytics efforts and I really need some help. I just don't trust the analytics data at this point. I don't know if my problem should be called duplicate content or what, but the SEOmoz crawler shows the following URLS (below) on my nonprofit's website. These are all versions of our main landing pages, and all google analytics data is getting split between them. For instance, I'll get stats for the /camp page and different stats for the /camp/ page. In order to make my report I need to consolidate the 2 sets of stats and re-do all the calculations. My CMS is looking into the issue and has supposedly set up redirects to the pages w/out the trailing slash, but they said that setting up the "ref canonical" is not relevant to our situation.
If anyone has insights or suggestions I would be grateful to hear them. I'm at my wit's end (and it was a short journey from my wit's beginning ...)
Thanks.
URL
-
Zsolt is correct.if you have a 301 redirecet to the slash, you must also have your internal links point at the slash, or visa versa if you 301 to non slash your internal links should do the same,
This is a common problem i find in WordPress sites.
Why this is important is each redirecet leaks a bit of link juice, site wide this adds up to a lot.
Your site has many html errors, another thing common to CMS.
unclosed tags can confuse a bot as to what is visible to the user
-
Hello Dave!
As I see the redirection is in place and www.enf.org/camp redirects to www.enf.org/camp/ and so on with the othe urls: all of them redirects to the one ending with /. I think you should simply neglect the ones tat do not end this way as anyone opening them would end up on the www.enf.org/camp/ type, but that is not rue the other way. So if I type www.enf.org/camp/ will never see www.enf.org/camp.
Consequence: if you examine only www.enf.org/camp/ you get the number of people visiting www.enf.org/camp/ and www.enf.org/camp as well. This is true woith all the other ones. It is enough to examine the one the users are redirected to.
-
Hi Dave,
In short, you are suffering from issues related to URL standardization. First let me share a few URL facts which you may or may not be aware of:
http://www.enf.org and http://enf.org are two different URLs
www.enf.org/oases and www.enf.org/oases/ are two different URLs
www.enf.org/Garden and www.enf.org/garden are two different URLs
In each case you may choose to show the identical content on each version of the URL, but they are in fact two distinct web addresses. You could choose to offer completely different content on each URL. This issue causes many SEO problems. The issue can and should be fixed.
The solution is to implement a couple generic regex expressions for your site. The actual solution varies depending upon the technology used for your site.
Step 1 - Decide upon how you want your URLs to appear. Do you prefer a trailing slash? or no? Which method you use isn't as important as picking one solution and sticking with it. For capitalization, it is strongly recommended to always use lower case letters.
Step 2 - Ask your web host or developer to make the following site wide changes:
Remove the trailing slash from all URLs (or add a slash, depending upon your preferred choice)
Force all URLs to lowercase letters
Step 3 - Test the solution. Try accessing the alternate versions of URLs such as the ones you shared in the list above. Each web page should only be accessible via a single URL. All of the other versions should redirect to the preferred format.
Once the solution is implemented, expect it to take about a month for all the changes to be captured by Google, then examine your reports again. They should appear much cleaner.
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
-
Google Analytics, Wordpress, Sumo - who to trust
Something is wrong. I have a website that according to Google Analytics gets zero relevant clicks, with most of the clicks it does get coming from Russia. Wordpress says it gets a hundred or so visitors a month, with most traffic going to the pages that I know rank. Sumo says the heat map got 76 clicks. How would you figure out what's really going on?
Reporting & Analytics | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Re-classifying a Traffic Source in Google Analytics
Hey All, I think it's inside of the Admin section of Google Analytics, right now I have a traffic source from the domain of indeed.ca that is being classified as Organic traffic when it should be classified as referring traffic, how can I tell Google Analytics that all traffic from this source should be classified as referral traffic and not organic traffic? Furthermore, after I make this change, will Google Analytics re-classify my past data so I can do a proper analysis? I can't remember how to do this and any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | EvansHunt1 -
Google Analytics Not Working
I added the code before tag but still google not showing it is installed. Status: Tracking Not Installed Last checked: Mar 15, 2013 10:38:10 PM PDT Can someone check my domain - www.plugnbuy.com
Reporting & Analytics | | chandubaba0 -
Google Analytics traffic hijacking?
Ran into something interesting a week ago - the same Google Analytics code was installed on two different sites by accident. The account was reporting traffic from both domains. Haven't found a definitive answer on how to stop this yet if it were to be used maliciously?
Reporting & Analytics | | khemistry0 -
Excluding referral traffic from a specific page Google analytics
Hi, I am trying to exclude from referrals from a particular page i.e. www.domain.com/nothispage within Google analytics, I have tried a couple variations within the advanced filter (Regex etc) section without much luck, could anyone assist ? Updated-trying to do this using a filter for the entire profile. Thanks Marc
Reporting & Analytics | | NRMA0 -
Analytics package beside google analytics
Hi, What analytics package can i use to track ecommerce transaction besides gogole analytics that is free of charge? Thanks Arthur
Reporting & Analytics | | VivaArturo0 -
Google Analytics
Hello In Google analytics you can obtain the number of visits as a result of non-paid search. You can also set up custom reports to find the number of organic searches. The numbers are different, so what is the obvious difference between these two metrics that I'm missing. Thanks in advance for any assistance. Neil
Reporting & Analytics | | mccormackmorrison0 -
Looking for a Google Analytics expert
Looking to hire a Google Analytics expert for a project. Dealing with trying to track traffic across multiple domains and then work with the Ecommerce options. Contact Jeff Logan @ Avelient with costs and time frame for work. [personal information removed by editors. please contact via private message system to exchange information]
Reporting & Analytics | | Avelient0