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.
Stats show /blog/wp-cron.php at the top. What is it?
-
Hi,
I have worked with websites for years but have no clue when it comes to Wordpress.
We have our main website and then a Wordpress blog running in a subfolder that is only about a year old. The blog has only 7 posts so you can see how small it is vs main website with 200 pages.
Usually our main index page of the site is at the top of the stats with the most views and this page /blog/wp-cron.php is about 30% lower. Now suddenly over the last month this page has jumped to the top and accessed almost as much as the home page of the site.
We took a big hit with the latest Google Update so we are tyring to determine if there is anything technical in our site that has caused an issue.
Thanks in advance
Force7
-
Thanks, I guess the only plugin I have that might be doing this is WordPress Database Backup by Austin Matzko.
Since I have my server backups, should I really need this extra?
-
Wordpress uses the wp-cron.php for scheduled stuff like db back ups, email postings, scheduled posts, calenders etc. So if you have plugins that do this like "calendar" or "events" plugins then this page should show more often.
Secondly, if you are using Google analytics then you really should not have the tracking code running on the wp- pages as this will slow your website down and can cause many other issues
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
-
Collecting post codes / zip codes in Google Analytics - Terms of Service
Hi Mozzers, Just reading up on Google Analytic's Terms of Service and wondering if collecting post codes / zip codes (from a website's 'Find my nearest...' tool) adhere's to the following: "You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service to track, collect or upload any data that personally identifies an individual (such as a name, email address or billing information), or other data which can be reasonably linked to such information by Google." What do you think?
Reporting & Analytics | | A_Q0 -
Need help with my "ghost" blog...
...when I fired my original web designer, did they sabotage coding? I have never checked my Alexa/Google Analytics, or any blog ranking until last night. Subsequently, I have spent the last 24 hours googling away, and finally joining MOZ b/c I'm desperate to find out WHY I'm not ranking. I've googled and found many answers to a problem directly opposite of mine: (How to increase traffic with a high ranking), but I already have quite a bit of traffic (via Wordpress Stats), but can not be found on any ranking system. So, fiddled with some NoFollow/NoIndex boxes in Genesis SEO settings thinking maybe when my domain name changed it messed everything up? Most the boxes HAD been checked, so I unchecked them all. Anyhow, basically signed up for the monthly service so i could ask this question on the forum. My site is hellowhitney.com **it's so weird---i have a LOT of organic direct hits coming directly to my blog (for instance a celebrity re-posted a post which gained a lot of traffic from Twitter to the page), but Google nor another ranking is seeing it. IN FACT, it stops any and all ranking data back to FEBRUARY 2016 when I changed my domain name from Myscriptedreality.com to HelloWhitney.com Ignorance is NOT bliss in this case--would appreciate any help! #ForeverGrateful
Reporting & Analytics | | hellowhitney0 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Will 301 redirects (Same Domain) show as referral traffic in Analytics?
For an eCommerce site we have 301'd legacy product pages to new product pages. Is all that traffic going to show up as referral traffic from our own domain in Google Analytics? If so, is there any way to preserve original source/medium info or will all the source/medium info be our own domain since there is a 301 redirect?
Reporting & Analytics | | bozzie3111 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Can you use Google tag manager to manage rich snippets/schema mark up?
Hi,Does anyone know if you can use the new Google tag manager to manage rich snippets? I've seen that there is an HTML section where you can edit HTML that isn't shown on the site - do you think this field could be used to add schema data?Thanks,Karen
Reporting & Analytics | | Digirank0 -
Should you get a new Google Analytics account if your site has a new domain after a site redesign/new development?
We recently developed a new site for a client and they have opted to move forward with a domain change. Should we create a new Google Analytics account for the new site?
Reporting & Analytics | | TheOceanAgency0 -
Email campaigns. Should I link to my blog or to my site?
I have a client for who we write and post a daily blog article. The articles are optimized and linked to particular targeted content on his top level site. Now we are going to start e-marketing to his 3000+ website users to announce inventory changes and specials. My question is (from a SE standpoint) are we better off linking the e-mail content to the blog and introducing people to the blog (but adding an additional step for getting to the new inventory. Or are we better off putting a link in the HTML E-mail letter that we send out to both the blog and separately to the inventory section? Just to clarify, we wonder if the search engines would provide some additional authority for the extra blog traffic and thereby build the overall score of the blog & site. We are looking at the e-mail campaigns as a potential opportunity to impact SE scores not just awareness of new inventory. Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | webindustry0