I have created a Google analytics account in 2007, to day when i was going through the report i found that the report contains some links that are not available on my site like "www.example.com/homepage/xyz......" but the file "xyz.." OR folder "homepage" is not available on my site. the GA report say's that about 27% of the site page views are from this page. when i try to open this URL's(www.example.com/homepage/xyz......) in my browser i was taken to a 404 page in my site. how can this happen...? when the url are not there on the site, appear on GA report..? Please help me if you need any details please feel free to contact me Thanks in advance. Bhanu Prasad www.4cs.com
Would it be possible someone made a link to your site that links to /homepage/xyz? You can use Yahoo's site explorer for more detail information. If you made a custom 404 page and has Analytics's code, Google tracks it as well. One trick you can do is, add a redirect from that non-existing page back to your home page. So then for sure those users will see your home page instead of a 404 great way to keep that strange traffics.
Thanks, I have created the 301 redirection for the non existing pages, But I find that there are page views and the average time on the pages is about 2 minutes on each page. I have about 29 such pages, so please let me know this is happening, I am thinking that GA is tracking the data of a existing page which is active, but in report it is showing the wrong URL.
If you want to see the details of what's going on with those pages, you can download the following plug-ins for Firefox browser. Live Http Header - This plug-in shows all the redirect happened under the hood. And other useful header information Firebug - This plug-in shows you how long does it take for each script to load. Like all the CSS, JS and even how long did the server start sending data back With those 2 plug-in you should be able to track down where the problem is.