Understanding Google Analytics?

[Dal123]

I keep checking my google analytics and the page that is being viewed the most (189 so far) is a page I don't think I have .
It is the / page.
I have had a look through my files and I don't have one called /. What is this? I thought maybe the / to get the file from the server as I read somewhere that // registers by going to the server twice.

 

[SrWebDeveloper]

That's the root directory, i.e. if your domain was abc.com then that shows people visiting "http://abc.com" or "http://www.abc.com/" in their browser. The others listed are explicitly referenced, i.e. "http://abc.com/index.html" which really is the same page as "http://www.abc.com/" but analytics sees the two as unique. Your goal is to use the shortest URL's possible, i.e. when promoting your site use "http://abc.com" in all marketing, business cards, search engine URL's, etc. - not "http://www.abc.com/index.html" although it is helpful the report lets you know how many folks are visiting that quite specific URL.

-jim

 

[Dal123]

Thanks Jim:
You're kidding they are showing me how many views they are getting. How stupid is that? It appears that I am getting traffic but I am not. Also confused why they get visits as there is nothing from my site promoting them (123reg.co.uk).
Thanks

 

[angelwatt]

Umm, "they" is you actually. Unless I'm missing something.

 

[SrWebDeveloper]

"Traffic" might include search engine spider crawling your site. The search engines gather information from domain registration, IP allocation and other resources, i.e. links to your site found on other sites. You can somewhat control this via a robots.txt file configured and placed in your document root. I say somewhat because not all spiders obeys robots.txt, but many do.

But the report you're seeing is telling you the most visited pages happen to be the home page followed by your galleries, which is to be expected and I'd take as good news.

-jim

 

[elitesouth]

SrWebDeveloper was right: / is the actual URL a user visits when they type in your URL. Your web server may automatically recognize that they should be going to your index page, but often times, it will still say "/"

Example:
When you visit http://elitesouth.com/ , you're really looking at http://elitesouth.com/index.php

You'll also notice that if you visit http://elitesouth.com , a "/" will be added to the end of the URL.

It's just one'o'them thangs.

 

[Dal123]

Thanks for that chums , so really it's all good .

 

[kenmarered]

On a slightly different topic, if I were you I'd make sure your website does not have any canonicalization issues.

A canonicalization problem exists where you may have four different links to your website:

www.example.com
example.com
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/index.html

In reality these links all point to the same page (your home page) but the search engines may not know this variations are to the same page thus the page isn't getting the full seo inbound link score. You can force the server to redirect these links to the same format (eg www.example.com/index.html) and/or use the canonicalization meta tag.

You can read more here:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/


This becomes even more relevant if the two websites in your tag are the same? It's hard to tell as only one of them points to a working site.

Hope that helps.

Feel free to pm me if you need more help on this topic.

 

[Dal123]

Cheers Ken, Great info there. Much appreciated .