For some reason Google Analytics is appending index.cfm to the end of all of my URLs when I look at them in GA. The domain used to be ColdFusion based, but is now a WordPress PHP website running on an Apache server without ColdFusion installed.
We've added new pages to the website, and GA is still reporting an index.cfm at the end of the URL, even though that page never existed on the old ColdFusion site.
I didn't set up the GA account initially, is there maybe a setting that was enabled? Or does it take GA a while to figure out it's not a ColdFusion website anymore?
By the way, the website in question is http://www.westgatereservations.com. Thanks.
--ADDED--
Screenshot of page list from Google Analytics. All of these pages are WordPress PHP pages that use a clean permalink URL structure.
This is Google Analytics's 'Default Page' feature. If you go to the Account Settings and Edit the Profile Information, you'll see there's a field called "Default Page". It basically does what the theoretical filter I described above does: it automatically appends the default page (in this case, index.cfm) onto every page URL that doesn't have a page suffix. It's a shortcut, since most of the time, users want /foo and /foo/index.html to be counted as the same thing. But it totally breaks on WordPress and 'prettified' URLs, since they don't have a file suffix.
Just remove the Default Page (leave it blank) and the problem should be resolved. I'm not sure if it will be retroactive (Google Analytics rarely allows retroactive changes), but it will resolve the problem moving forward.
Read more about Google Analytics Default Page
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I created a page on a Wordpress site that was for internal use only and triggers some backend code. Within a few days I started seeing hits on that page from "bingbot".
I'm not using any kind of sitemap plugin. How are crawlers finding this page?
I know the robots.txt file can block them but I want to make sure they don't show up for crawlers that don't respect this. I still want to have the page publicly accessible if someone types in the URL.
What needs to be done in Wordpress to make sure a page can't be discovered except by typing in the URL?
Any given URL is potentially "discovered" once the post is published and if there's a link to it from elsewhere on your site. There's no guaranteed way to prevent search engines from indexing a URL.
I have a website lets say http://www.example.com which is on shopware and uses google analytics to determine site traffic. I have designed a landing page which is placed at http://www.example.com/landing/index.html. Can I use the same tracking id that I have on other pages on my landing page? Will it appear under all website data section or will it create another automatically?
Actual website is not at example . com its just for reference purpose.
Yes, of course. The Google Analytics web tracker is client side code, it does not really care if your pages have been created by a shop system or by manually entering code somewhere. By the time it is displayed in the browser it's all just HTML.
The data will show up in "All Website data" (which is the only view GA ever creates automatically, everything else you need to set up yourself as needed).
Working on a live Wordpress website deleted a page that has been published by mistake:
1- Turned the page into a Draft page, but it was still showing
2- Moved the page to Trash on the Wordpress dashboard and then deleted it permanently from the bin, but it still showing in the google search.
3-Cleared the catch, but it still showing up in google search and the link returns a 404 error.
Following up Google instruction:
Make removal permanent:
Remove or update the actual content from your site (images, pages,
directories) and make sure that your web server returns either a 404
(Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status code. Non-HTML files (like PDFs)
should be completely removed from your server. (Learn more about HTTP
status codes)
Block access to the content, for example by requiring a password.
Indicate that the page should not to be indexed using the noindex meta
tag. This is less secure than the other methods.The Remove URLs tool is
only a temporary
The first part is easy and shows the 404 error.
The second part:
Turning the page to a password protected page, now it takes me to password protected page and it is still showing on the Google search.
Also for noindex I had the following options:
Any idea why or any recommendation?
Thank you
Google search is based on indexing, it takes time to update your website's content, pages, and dependencies. Search updates are based on mechanism of Google crawlers (so called spiders). These spiders crawls your website's content and follow your meta tags and robots.txt file.
Generally, it will take about 1-3 days to get your page removed from the search results. There are no quick ways to do it as it is based on indexing. Make sure you update your Google webmasters account (just check for errors on your account which relates to a page not found).
Just wondered if there is a known issue with GA having trouble tracking a site which has a Wordpress directory?
It seems to be able to track all of my other pages on the site, but we have a /news/ directory which is powered by Wordpress and it doesn't pick this up at all. It is obviously an issue with the fact that this directory is a Wordpress blog, but there must be a way to track it with all of the other pages.
Aaahhh... Sounds like the google analytics tracking code is present on your main site pages, but is not included in the wordpress template that's applied to that sub-section of your site.
The GA tracking code must be visible to google on every page you want to have tracked.
Try 'View Source' in your browser, and check wether the analytics tracking code is present.
If not, you could hard-code the GA tracking code in, or use one of the free WordPress Plugins to do it for you, like 'Google Analytics':
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/googleanalytics/
Hope this helps - post back if you're still having problems!
Rick
It may not be related, but did you check if your blog is indexable? Under Settings -> Privacy you can check if its enabled.
Another option is to install a google analytics plugin for the blog. If you enter the same credentials from your already-in-use GA it should be combined. I'm using this one on my blog and its working.
I want to track traffic for mysite.com/current-campaign/ and careless about traffic on mysite.com in general.
Is it ok to place the GA tracking code in the files inside the /current-campaign/ folder or does it HAVE TO be in the root of the server for tracking to work?
GA will only track on the pages you actually put the tracking code on, regardless of where the page is located (unless you start messing with things like domain settings or filters etc..).
So IOW yes, it is okay to do that. If you don't have tracking code on mysite.com/somePage.html then it's not gonna track that page (though it might show up as the URL in some reports like referring URL or exit link or whatever, same as any other page you don't track)
In Google Analytics, you can add a filter to the profile and filter all but the chosen directories. Go to Analytics Settings > Profile Settings and look for "Add Filter" link.
In addition to Crayon's answer, you can limit tracking to a subdirectory by using _setCookiePath() function in your tracking function. See Analytics documentation on single subdirectory (note the link anchor is not resolved to a correct header, at least for me).
This is advised in the documentation to use when you only want to track a subdirectory and avoid clashes with Analytics trackers possibly in use in other subdirectories.
I work for a department in a large university.
The department's web page resides at www.some-uni.com/department-name/.
I only have FTP access to the sub-folder /department-name/ and nothing else on the site.
It was quite easy to get Google Analytics to track traffic within the subfolder /department-name/, ignoring the rest of the site. All I did was create a profile in GA, setting the default url to www.some-uni.com/department-name/. I then pasted the tracking code into the pages I wished to track.
It took about eight hours for anything to show up in GA, but after that it worked just fine.