Site appears as folder of another domain in reports.

Is it the site, the browser, or Analytics that is screwing up?

[g1smd]

My Google Analytics setup is very specific. Each profile has some additional filters to customise the data shown within.

There is one profile that records only visitors where the requested hostname exactly matches '

www.example.com

'. This profile tracks all visitors who actually looked directly at the site itself.

There is another profile that records only visitors where the requested hostname was NOT '

www.example.com

'. This profile tracks all visitors looking at other domains that have the real site's tracking code installed. This includes page views of search engine cache pages and any archive or scraper sites.

Last week I espied something odd within this latter profile.

Someone had viewed '

/thispage.html

', but it was showing in the '

other domains

' profile as a pageview of '

/www.example.com/thispage.html

' (i.e. the real domain name is reported as if it were a folder of some other domain) for the requested hostname '

csp.o2.co.uk

'.

The user had viewed the site on a mobile device using

SymbianOS

and

Safari

browser, and

O2 Online

is their provider.

Why is this page view (and all other page views made by this user) mis-reported? Is this a glitch with the analytics code running in the browser, or with the browser itself? Is it a glitch at Google's end? Is there a problem on the site itself that might cause this effect? Is it something to do with the way that O2 serve content to mobile users? What is '

csp

' anyway; is it some sort of cache system?

HTTP requests to

csp.o2.co.uk/www.example.com/thispage.html

do not resolve (at least they don't resolve from the 'outside' world, from another ISP), so I don't think there is a 'copy' of the website involved here.

[leadegroot]

I expect you have excluded this, but if this is an 'add on domain' then the domain content will be available as
http://www.example.com/thispage.html
and
http:// www.parentdomain.com /exampleusername /thispage.html,
(spaces to stop the link being clickable)
and exampleusername could well be www.example.com - and that would explain the page view.

Otherwise, probably just a GA data glitch. I see incredibly unlikely things in there all the time. :(

[g1smd]

No it's not an add-on domain; and there's just about every canonicalisation redirect rule known to man installed on the site.

The subdomain that this site is being reported as being a folder within - for just this one user - is one belonging to a major UK mobile telephone network.

Via the power of Twitter, I have been alerted to this blog post: [davidnaylor.co.uk...] and that seems more than a little related; it details a similar-sounding problem (seen from a different angle) with another branch, in another country, of the same mobile telephone company.

[g1smd]

It appears that CSP stands for Customer Service Profile and it appears to be a way of blocking access to various types of content based on the level of subscription the customer pays. Beyond that, I have no other ideas as to what it does. It does appear to create a new and duplicate URL for every page of content that their customers are allowed to view.