Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
No-indexed pages are still showing up as landing pages in Google Analytics
-
Hello,
My website is a local job board. I de-indexed all of the job listing pages on my site (anything that starts with http://www.localwisejobs.com/job/).
When I search site:localwisejobs.com/job/, nothing shows up. So I think that means the pages are not being indexed.
When I look in Google Analytics at Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Landing Pages, none of the job listing pages show up.
But when I look at Acquisition > Channels > Organic and then click Landing Page as the primary dimension, the /job pages show up in there.
Why am I seeing this discrepency in Organic Landing pages? And why would the /job pages be showing up as landing pages even though they aren't indexed?
-
I generally recommend meta noindex without blocking via robots.txt for reasons like this.
First, click secondary dimension and check out source / medium. Are they coming from Google? If all you did was use the remove tool on Google Webmaster Tools, Bing/Yahoo don't get the message yet.
Search engines cannot see a noindex tag on the page if they're blocked from crawling the page. They can't access the page to read the tag. So it can sit around in the index despite not having been crawled for a while. (Though usually it's removed eventually).
Also keep in mind that you see some landing page traffic from instances where GA fails to fire the first time. It's usually a VERY tiny percentage, but I often see traffic to some (virtual pageview) popups that can't even load without entering info on our site (e.g. it's not even a possible landing page).
Might I also ask why you removed the job listing from the index? I was thinking this might be a good time to use rather than blocking crawlers outright. That assumes, of course, that you keep listing up for a fixed time. If you know when the job listing is going to expire, you can just tell the search engine. They might even send some traffic to your individual listings while live.
-
Not completely relevant, but might be good to be aware of this, the site is serving me a HTTP authentication form to login into your domain on port 80 when I visit the site.
-
We'd find the landing page in organic landing page reports as something like:
http://www.blablahsitewhatever.com/landingpage?s=bing|display|20150826
instead of
http://www.blablahsitewhatever.com/landingpageIt's clearly not an organic hit since it came through a paid channel, and yet gets classified as organic. (We got around it by building a custom report for organic landing pages that specifically filters out landing pages with those extra parameters.) So from this we know it's entirely possible for traffic to be misattributed as organic when it's clearly not. But unless you can clearly see it in the URL like that, it's really hard to suss out.
-
Thanks Rebecca. We removed via Manual removal using Google Webmaster Console AND added a noindex entry in robotos.txt. When you say the "organic landing page had campaign parameters attached specific to paid Bing campaigns" where were these campaign parameters attached? In the URL leading to the page from the paid source or in a link embedded somewhere in the page or in some analytics javascript that was firing somewhere or something else?
-
How exactly did you do the no-index? Robots.txt? Meta robots tag? Manual removal via Google Webmaster Console?
Beyond that, I have seen some paid traffic misattributed as organic before, which we caught because the organic landing page had campaign parameters attached specific to paid Bing campaigns.
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
-
Why is Indeed.com traffic appearing as organic in Google Analytics?
A large number of sessions in my client's Google Analytics account appear to come from medium: organic and source:Indeed. Since I'm focused on SEO for this project, I'd prefer that Indeed be treated as referral traffic. Any ideas for fixing this issue? Also, and I'm sure the answer is no, is there a way to fix the past data in Google Analytics that has already reported Indeed as an organic medium?
Reporting & Analytics | | Kevin_P0 -
Google analytics suddenly stopped tracking all my landing pages
Hey guys. I love the new update of GA. Looks so clean. So, of course, I was excited to see how my landing pages were doing. I went to behavior, all content, all pages. And I noticed it's only showing me 19 pages out of the 93 I have indexed. And none of the top ones at all! Can't find them anywhere in GA! Anyone seen this before? Thank you so much
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
"index.htm" for all url's in google analytics
I don't have this issue with other wordpress websites, only this one website, and I don't know what's causing the issue: Google Analytics is adding an "index.htm" to every single page on the website. So it is tracking the pages, I see no errors - is it tracking the right page? When I click on the page link in a report, I naturally go to a "404 page not found" since the website address isn't "www.example.com/rewards/index.htm" - but instead the actual address would be:
Reporting & Analytics | | cceebar
"www.example.com/rewards/". I have navigated to View Settings in GA to insure "default page" is empty. Although adding anything else to this field does not effect the page url in analytics reports either. Could it be htaccess file - or a plugin effecting the htaccess file?_Cindy0 -
Google Analytics Real Time Not Working! :(
Hello Everyone, Today, the real time feature in my google analytics stopped working. I am able to see that traffic is visiting my site, but not in real time. The real time count is usually at 0. But, there are some instances where real time will come back online, but there will be only 1 unique visitor. At any given time, our website usually has 20 visitors or so..Has anyone encountered this issue? Where should i start looking for fixes? What are the possible problems? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | KarlMarxTheBear0 -
Tracking time spent on a section of a website in Google Analytics
Hi, I've been asked by a client to track time spent or number of pages visited on a specific section of their website using Google Analytics but can't see how to do this. For example, they have a "golf" section within their site and want to measure how many people either visit 5 page or more within the golf section or spend at least 6 minutes browsing the various golf section pages. Can anyone advise how if this can be done, and if so, how I go about it. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | geckonm0 -
Getting google impressions for a site not in the index...
Hi all Wondering if i could pick the brains of those wise than myself... my client has an https website with tons of pages indexed and all ranking well, however somehow they managed to also set their server up so that non https versions of the pages were getting indexed and thus we had the same page indexed twice in the engine but on slightly different urls (it uses a cms so all the internal links are relative too). The non https is mainly used as a dev testing environment. Upon seeing this we did a google remove request in WMT, and added noindex in the robots and that saw the index pages drop over night. See image 1. However, the site still appears to getting return for a couple of 100 searches a day! The main site gets about 25,000 impressions so it's way down but i'm puzzled as to how a site which has been blocked can appear for that many searches and if we are still liable for duplicate content issues. Any thoughts are most welcome. Sorry, I am unable to share the site name i'm afraid. Client is very strict on this. Thanks, Carl image1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | carl_daedricdigital0 -
How do I manually add transactions to Google Analytics
We are seeing Google Analytic's drop transaction on our site so therefore all the figures are skewed. Is there a way I can manually add transactions to GA to cover the missing one?
Reporting & Analytics | | Towelsrus0 -
Comparing % Change, Google Analytics
Hey Mozzers, Is there a simple way to compare the "% Change" in traffic when comparing two separate time periods in a single Google Analytics report? When comparing data from two separate time periods, an exported CSV doesn't include the % Change (booo!), and there's no option to sort by % Change within the GA report, essentially forcing you to scroll through all the results to pinpoint the major movers and shakers. I'm not averse to using spreadsheets to sort this data, but I'm thinking that I'd likely need a macro to make this work, something like this. However, none of the macros on that page are working (possibly because they were designed for a previous version of Analytics). All suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | dangaul0