Landing page URL appearing as keyword
-
Hi Mozers,
I've recently experienced the URLs of my key landing pages coming up as keywords.
This has been on the rise since early July (when it was relatively insignificant) to the current position (see image below) where they make up the majority of my top keywords.
Drilling down into a bit more detail, this seems to be almost exclusively Desktop traffic but in terms of Technology there are no clear standouts (seems to be mostly Windows OS and Chrome).
Has anyone else been experiencing this?
-
These keywords are not appearing in Webmaster tools at all so I'm thinking it could just be an Analytics quirk, still weird that no-one else has picked up on it.
The only annotation I have on my Analytics is that the Data Highlighting tool was used (in Webmaster Tools) on these pages. Potentially linked but I still can't see how?
-
Weirdly it's only 4/5 of my main landing pages this is happening for - that does make me think it might be something to do with links so I'll look into that.
Usage stats are amazing so it wouldn't think it's scrapers:
| 2.65 | 00:02:46 | 73.24% | 15.11% |
Those stats look like direct traffic so I thought it could be a browser problem (searching for a URL instead of going to it when typed in the address bar?) but again, it seems to be across all browsers and I'd expect someone else to have picked up on it.
| | | | | |
-
Hmm, interesting.
Like Richard mentioned, any particular links to those pages? even nofollowed?
Another few things to analyze:
-> Average time on site for those visits? Is it very low?
-> User agent data - Segment and Filter Robot Traffic?
There are more and more scrappers who crawl search results for particular queries (especially to monitor stuff).
-
Just a few ideas:
- Rumus brings up a good point. You have to ask yourself, why people are searching for you using URL's? I would definitely take a look at the demographics page of your analytics and see if this can help paint a prettier picture for you. Obviously you want to look at the location of your visitors like Rumus pointed out, but I would also look at device and operating system, to see if there's not a common pattern.
- I would also look at your webmaster and hosting company. People searching by a particular URL, makes me wonder if the page is working at all times of the day?
- Also I would do a link analysis of those pages. Are people listing that URL and not linking to it? If so that would be weird, but it's definitely an idea.
I hope that helps!
-
No, nothing out of the ordinary there and I certainly wouldn't expect someone to be analyzing it so much that it comes up as one of my top keywords.
-
Look at the geographical data and see if they all come from the same place. It might be that somebody is analyzing your URL's!
-
Image attached to this post
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
-
Fire a tag when element is loaded on page (Google Tag Manager)
I'm using an Element Visibility trigger to track a value that appears on a page. However, I want to track this value even when the user doesn't scroll to the area of the page where the element is (i.e. when the page is loaded, and the value is displayed below the fold, but the user doesn't scroll down there). Is there a way of doing this
Reporting & Analytics | | RWesley0 -
Vanity URL vs domain URL
Hi guys, Our CEO is having an interview with a known broadcaster on radio. During the interview he will mention a specific URL www.example.com/marketingcampaign that we want track on Google Analytics, therefore behaving like a vanity URL redirecting to the actual URL www.example.com/resources/primary-keyword-2018. Would this work the same way a vanity URL in terms of tracking or not such as following guideline here ? I am asking because vanity URLs are supposed to be completely different domain name that gets purchased and in our case it is the same domain name just with a different URI. thanks guys!
Reporting & Analytics | | Taysir0 -
How is Google Analytics defining page depth?
We run two websites and as part of our KPIs we are treating those who visit 3 or more pages of our website as a client served. As a digital team we are not convinced that this is the best metric to use as the improvements we are making to the sites mean that people are able to find the information quicker. Additionally other organisations including forums etc link to us so those users will get the info they need in one click. What I would like to know is how Google calculates page depth in GA. Are they treating the landing page as ground zero and then when users clicks a link they go one page deep? Or is the landing page, page depth 1 . Is page depth a measure of how many clicks a user needs to find their information?
Reporting & Analytics | | MATOnlineServices0 -
Huge Traffic Drop after 301, Keyword and Schema.org Fixes
Hello there, I'm first gonna explain what I did to my website: I was using a 302 redirect to send from http to https, fixed it to a 301. My url has a keyword and I was using many pages with keywords as well. ex) www.keywordhaha.com/keyword-the-best , www.keywordhaha.com/keyword-easiest-on-keyword-market Changed it to : www.keywordhaha.com/app , www.keywordhaha.com/games, etc... I was not using any crawler tools, so I added Schema.org, Json-LD and rdfa-node, which are all working properly. Synced my page with our Google+ page, which was recognised by Google Added a proper logo and fb:admins, and was recognised by facebook. After I did all this optimisations, I experienced an immediate traffic drop (10%) and my impressions/clicks according to the webmaster tools dropped 75%, in a 2 day period. Any ideas where there could have been a mistake? mPdhFdG.png
Reporting & Analytics | | jancpc0 -
Traffic by keyword- phenomenon
I have several keywords that seem to bring visitors in but when I look at my rankings it shows that I have no ranking authority at all. Are these just robots or some non human click? Or how do I even get these visitors?
Reporting & Analytics | | Retail_Endeavors0 -
Duplicate page content
I'm seeing duplicate page content for tagged URLs. For example:
Reporting & Analytics | | DolbySEO
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/about-us/careers/landing.html
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/about-us/careers/landing.html?onlnk=al-sc as well as PPC campaigns. We tag certain landing pages purposefully in order to understand that traffic comes from these pages, since we use Google Analytics and don't have the abiility to see clickpaths in the package we have. Is there a way to set parameters for crawling to exclude certain pages or tagged content, such as those set up for PPC campaigns?0 -
Why are Seemingly Randomly Generated URLs Appearing as Errors in Google Webmaster Tools?
I've been confused by some URLs that are showing up as errors in our GWT account. They seem to just be randomly generated alphanumeric strings that Google is reporting as 404 errors. The pages do 404 because nothing ever existed there or was linked to. Here are some examples that are just off of our root domain: /JEzjLs2wBR0D6wILPy0RCkM/WFRnUK9JrDyRoVCnR8= /MevaBpcKoXnbHJpoTI5P42QPmQpjEPBlYffwY8Mc5I= /YAKM15iU846X/ymikGEPsdq 26PUoIYSwfb8 FBh34= I haven't been able to track down these character strings in any internet index or anywhere in our source code so I have no idea why Google is reporting them. We've been pretty vigilant lately about duplicate content and thin content issues and my concern is that there are an unspecified number of urls like this that Google thinks exist but don't really. Has anyone else seen GWT reporting errors like this for their site? Does anyone have any clue why Google would report them as errors?
Reporting & Analytics | | kimwetter0