I need help troubleshooting 2 main issues with our Google Analytics data. Both started occurring around May 5, 2020. I've worked through troubleshooting recommendations in few blog posts but have had no luck. Can anyone point me in the right direction for how to troubleshoot these issues?
Organic traffic has dropped considerably on our /blog/ pages while direct/none traffic has increased. When I check Google Search Console's organic search data, I see numbers that reflect the organic + direct/none traffic in google analytics.
When I look at the landing page report, there is a huge increase in (not set) landing pages on our blog. I saw 14,000% and 26,000% increases... Our overall landing page traffic is down by 15%. Weirdly, the URI is known, but the landing page is (not set)...?
Please check out this video to see the data in GA - http://m.bixel1.net/jxe9ei
One potential cause is that we have a homepage redirect for anyone using chrome. The redirect goes from / to /c/ for anyone on chrome and is hard coded. We've been testing this since the beginning of the year and we switched the test to serve to 100% of chrome visitors on March 26, 2020. Could this possibly be causing our traffic issues?
The redirect certainly creates anomalies (consider that when landing on the page both / and /c/ are tracked).
I noticed, for example by accessing a blog page from google, that the pageview has no referrer while the events sent after 30 seconds have it (and it is google.com).
Check your configuration in Google Tag Manager if there is any strange setting on the referral or something configured that can interfere with the referrer.
In any case, this (referrer) is surely the reason why you have the (not set).
Related
I wondered if someone could answer this question.
When putting in place 301 redirects for an old website to a new website. Would the metadata from the old website show on Google. If so, what is the best way to resole this?
How will our meta description, google preview and such like be impacted by the redirect? Meaning, will the current ones still show up once the redirect is in place, or will it be the meta description and google preview of the url it is being pointed to?
I guess that question applies to pretty much all of the current site settings/errors. Will we still be ranked on these and therefore is it in our interest to fix any errors with on the old site or should all the focus be on the destination domain, i.e. will any errors or settings on the referring domain no longer matter?
My blog was successfully transferred to octopress and github-pages. My problem though is that website's search uses google search but the result of 'search' as you can see, are pointing to the old (wordpress) links. Now these links have change structure, following default octopress structure.
I don't understand why this is happening. Is it possible for google to have stored in it's DB the old links (my blog was 1st page for some searches, but gathered just 3.000 hits / month... not much by internet's standards) and this will change with time, or is it something I'm able to change somehow?
thanks.
1.You can wait for Google to crawl and re-index your
pages, or you can use the URL Removal Request tool
to expedite removal of old pages from the index.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=61062
According to that page, the removal process
"usually takes 3-5 business days."
Consider submitting a Sitemap:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318
click here to resubmit your sitemap.
More information about Sitemaps:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34575
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8467
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8477
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html
2.Perhaps your company might consider the
Google Mini? You could set up the Mini to
crawl the site every night or even 'continuously'.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/
According to the US pricing page,
the Mini currently starts at $1995 for a
50,000-document license with a year of support.
Here is the Google Mini discussion group:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Mini
http://www.google.com/enterprise/hosted_vs_appliance.html
(Click: "show all descriptions")
http://www.google.com/support/mini/
(Google Mini detailed FAQ)
I recently purchased the domain www.iacro.dk from UnoEuro and installed WordPress planning to integrate blogging with Facebook. However, I cannot even get to share a link to the domain.
When I try to share any link on my timeline, it gives the error "The content you're trying to share includes a link that's been blocked for being spammy or unsafe: iacro.dk". Searching, I came across Sucuri SiteCheck which showed that McAfee TrustedSource had marked the site as having malicious content. Strange considering that I just bought it, it contains nothing but WordPress and I can't find any previous history of ownership. But I got McAfee to reclassify it and it now shows up green at SiteCheck. However, now a few days later, Facebook still blocks it. Clicking the "let us know" link in the FB block dialog got me to a "Blocked from Adding Content" form that I submitted, but this just triggered a confirmation mail stating that individual issues are not processed.
I then noticed the same behavior as here and here: When I type in any iacro.dk link on my Timeline it generates a blank preview with "(No Title)". It doesn't matter if it's the front page, a htm document or even an image - nothing is returned. So I tried the debugger which returns the very generic "Error Parsing URL: Error parsing input URL, no data was scraped.". Searching on this site, a lot of people suggest that missing "og:" tags might cause no scraping. I installed a WP plugin for that and verified tag generation, but nothing changed. And since FB can't even scrape plain htm / jpg from the domain, I assume tags can be ruled out.
Here someone suggests 301 Redirects being a problem, but I haven't set up redirection - I don't even have a .htaccess file.
So, my questions are: Is this all because of the domain being marked as "spammy"? If so, how can I get the FB ban lifted? However, I have seen examples of other "spammy" sites where the preview is being generated just fine, e.g. http://dagbok.nu described in this question. So if the blacklist is not the only problem, what else is wrong?
This is driving me nuts so thanks a lot in advance!
I don't know the details, but it is a problem that facebook has with web sites hosted on shared servers, i.e. the server hosting your web site also hosts a number of other web sites.
I have a website where 50% of the pages have a limited lifetime.
To give an idea, 4.000 pages appear each week and the same amount disappears.
By "appearing" and "disappearing", I mean that the appearing pages are completely new ones, and disappearing pages are removed from the website forever. There is no "this new page replaces this old page".
I naively used a 410 code on every URL where a page had disappeared.
Meaning the url http://mywebsite/this-page-was-present-until-yesterday.php returned until yesterday a 200 OK code, and returns now a 410 Gone code.
I didn't use no redirect, because I want to tell the user that the URL he accessed isn't wrong, but that it is expired.
The problem is : Google won't acknowledge this information. It is still crawling the pages and Webmaster Tools alerts me as if the page was 404 broken. This affects significantly my "reputation".
Did I do something wrong ? How should I proceed ?
It's always a very good idea to make your own error page. This can save you a lot of visits through broken links.
.htaccess error pages
The Webmaster Tools of Google enables you to delete certain pages.
You can find this under "crawler access".
Try adding a noindex header.
Apologies if SO is not the right place for this, but there are 700+ other SEO questions on here.
I'm a senior developer for a travel site with 12k+ pages. We completely redeveloped the site and relaunched in January, and with the volatile nature of travel, there are many pages which are no longer on the site. Examples:
/destinations/africa/senegal.aspx
/destinations/africa/features.aspx
Of course, we have a 404 page in place (and it's a hard 404 page rather than a 30x redirect to a 404).
Our SEO advisor has asked us to 30x redirect all our 404 pages (as found in Webmaster Tools), his argument being that 404's are damaging to our pagerank. He'd want us to redirect our Senegal and features pages above to the Africa page (which doesn't contain the content previously found on Senegal.aspx or features.aspx).
An equivalent for SO would be taking a url for a removed question and redirecting it to /questions rather than showing a 404 'Question/Page not found'.
My argument is that, as these pages are no longer on the site, 404 is the correct status to return. I'd also argue that redirecting these to less relevant pages could damage our SEO (due to duplicate content perhaps)? It's also very time consuming redirecting all 404's when our site takes some content from our in-house system, which adds/removes content at will.
Thanks for any advice,
Adam
The correct status to return is 410 Gone. I wouldn't want to speculate about what search engines will do if they are redirected to a page with entirely different content.
As I know 404 is quite bad for SEO because your site won't get any PageRank for pages linked from somewhere but missing.
I would added another page, which will explain that due to redesign original pages are not available, offering links to some other most relevant pages. (e.g. to Africa and FAQ) Then this page sounds like a good 301 answer for those pages.
This is actually a good idea.
As described at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work
(which is a good resource for the non seo people here)
404 is obviously not good. A 301 tells spiders/users that this is a permanent redirect of a source. The content should not get flagged as duplicate because you are not sending a 200 (good page) response and so there is nothing spidered/compared.
This IS kinda a grey hat tactic though so be careful, it would be much better to put actual 301 pages in place where it is looking for the page and also to find who posted the erroneous link and if possible, correct it.
I agree that 404 is the correct status, but than again you should take a step back and answer the following questions:
Do these old pages have any inbound links?
Did these old pages have any good, relevant content to the page you are 301'ing it to?
Is there any active traffic that is trying to reach these pages?
While the pages may not exist I would investigate the pages in question with those 3 questions, because you can steer incoming traffic and page rank to other existing pages that either need the PR/traffic or to pages that are already high traffic.
With regards to your in house SEO saying you are losing PR this can be true of those pages have inbound links, because you they will be met with a 404 status code and will not pass link juice, since nothing exists there any more. That's why 301's rock.
404s should not affect overall pagerank of other web pages of a website.
If they are really gone then 404/410 is appropriate. Check the official google webmasters blog.