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Google Analytics and the Not Found error in Web Master Tool reports

with 2 comments

googlebotThis post will be valuable to you if:

1) You use Google Analytics and sometime call pagetracker._trackPageview(’/your_argument’);

and

2) Have you noticed in your webmaster tools reports that googlebot is indexing URLs /your_argument and reporting a not found error.

3) If you were looking for an explanation to the trackpageview error in webmaster tools.

At this point you might be wondering why googlebot looks within javascript tag and follows what seems to be a URL formatted string. Frankly, I don’t have an answer to that. I guess it has to do with googlebot trying to get the most content out of every page.

Normally you would assume that broken links and not found contents could hurt your positioning and you’ll try to fix this situation. Besides you don’t want to have broken links in your site. The problem here is that there are no real links to fix.

 

I’m not sure that this actually will affect your positioning but if you’re a perfectionist and will like to fix this, here is what you can do:

1) When using trackPageview with argument use a preceding directory, for example /tag. The call will look something like this pagetracker._trackPageview(’/tag/your_argument’);

2) Include and exclusion rule for /tag directory in robots.txt. Here is how.

Although I regularly call tracpageview with arguments I haven’t recieved call from all my customer asking for the not found error in webmaster tool, that makes me think that if the argument string is not formated as URL the problem doesn’t happen so that might be another way to go.

Are you having this problem?

Is this what you were looking for?

Does this post helps you?

I would appreciate your feedback.

with 2 comments

Written by Andrés Flores

September 22nd, 2008 at 5:49 pm

2 Responses to 'Google Analytics and the Not Found error in Web Master Tool reports'

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  1. Could you please give us credit for the use of the image?

    http://www.evisibility.com/blog/say-hello-to-the-new-google-bot-logo/

    steve peron

    6 Feb 09 at 12:07 am

  2. Andrés

    6 Feb 09 at 3:55 am

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