Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I'm looking at my site statistics and although the home page shows as the majority of the entry pages, some of the other internal pages are showing up as entry pages. I'm wondering what some of the possible reasons for this would be -- I have a couple of thoughts, but I don't know if any of these are reasonable. I just think it's highly unlikely that anyone is directly accessing any of the internal pages.
I have some traffic from AOL subscribers. Since they have dynamic IP addresses, could it cause other pages to show up as an entry page when they move around on the site?
If someone opens a link in a new window, will this cause the new page to be counted as an entry page?
hehe, me too :-)
Are you getting any traffic from search engines?
oops, where are my manners?
Welcome to webmasterworld lbjones!
I've had a little search engine traffic. Unfortunately most of it was before the site was actually live, so I'm still waiting for some of them to come around again now that we have content.
I did see one odd entry -- my statistics report shows any search engines that people linked from, including Google. The latest stats also showed links from "sites other than search engines," and gave just an IP address, which turned out to be Google. Why wasn't it recognized as a search engine?
maybe your stats tool just doesn't have an updated list of se IP addresses?
regarding your q about entry pages other than the index, my guess would be that thats your search engine traffic - do your interior pages come up for the search referrals in your logs?
For the site I run, almost all of the search engine traffic comes in on interior pages, the home page isn't optimised for any terms at all. I'd rather have little traffic on each of many search terms than a lot of traffic on one main phrase.
That way you can afford to lose rankings on a few during updates without it decimating your traffic.
>most of it was before the site was actually live
Now I'm confused! You were getting search engine traffic before you had your site up? Or did you have a single page that was pulling a bit of se traffic?
I think all the referrals are for the home page...we're running basically a company brochure-ware site -- the people coming to us are people who already know a little about us. The business has always been built on personal networking and a website was a monumental leap for these guys. I can't convince them that we can and should be shooting for a broader audience.
>Now I'm confused! You were getting search engine traffic before you had your site up? Or did you have a single page that was pulling a bit of se traffic?
Sorry - I misspoke. There was just one page -- the "under construction" notice -- that was getting se traffic previously. The pages were all ready but (unexpectedly) on hold while I was waiting for final approval for a little more than a month - needless to say, some updates were then needed, which caused additional delay... It's a very small company and almost everyone has a financial stake - thus, an opinion. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Also you could be getting crawled by search engines or other automated agents that refuse cookies. Depending on how your tracking is set up each request could look like an entry.
so I'm now obsessed with trying to understand the statistics
...know the feeling ;-)
I have some traffic from AOL subscribers. Since they have dynamic IP addresses, could it cause other pages to show up as an entry page when they move around on the site?
Yes. If you don't use cookies this is excactly what happens. Most webstat systems count sessions based on uniquie IP-numbers.
If someone opens a link in a new window, will this cause the new page to be counted as an entry page?
Not if is with the same IP-number. However, if you're looking at referrals it would cause a "no referral".
Good luck!
