Dealing with a 404

[iain]

Hi there,

I have an error on one of my campaigns. It says that it gets a 404on this page:

http://www.datasat.com/tetra/white-paper.htmlWEhjdAfgkh

However, I cannot replicate the above URL as it doesn't exist on the site. The end of the URL has some spurious characters which I don't know how they got there.

Has anyone any ideas about what's happening and how I can sort it?

Many thanks

[BlueprintMarketing]

the  letters after the URL's HTML is a tracking code for tracking shared urls

hope that helps,

Thomas

[AndersS]

Hi!

OpenSiteExplorer shows an inbound link from www.datasat.com/mining/tetra-networks-for-mining.html. I looked at the page source, and it contains an empty link towards this particular page right after the correct link to your whitepaper.

Best regards,
Anders

[BlueprintMarketing]

This is because of GA & http://www.a1webstats.com/

http://www.a1webstats.com/stats/pt.js

see this linkhttps://builtwith.com/datasat.com

To fix 301 &

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

For an example of this type of data you can see, click on the link below:

http://www.a1webstats.com/stats/view-report.aspx?ReportID=9B7D261C-F465-46DC-8751-D4367AC02E11

What this shows you is information that often includes the search phrase typed into Google Images and it always shows you the path that each person took through the website.  As you can see from the example link above, a click from a Google Images search can lead to lots of pages being viewed.

Step 3 – Raising your visibility in Google Images

Being realistic, the majority of people that search for something in Google Images, are not going to be potential buyers.  They could just be casually interested or need an image for something they’re working on.

What you should be interested in are the small percentage who ARE potentially useful to you.

Take the example of that link http://www.a1webstats.com/stats/view-report.aspx?ReportID=9B7D261C-F465-46DC-8751-D4367AC02E11 – that shows just 7 visitors who went to the website (from Google Images) and looked at a few pages (within a week).   There were actually a lot more Google Images visits but we’ve shown just those that are of most interest/value.   If that business had only those 7 visitors in a week then the opportunities to convert them to enquiries/business aren’t great.  But what if they had 70, 170, 270, more …

Quite simply, the more traffic there is from Google Images, the more potential there is that some of those visitors are going to be potentially useful.

The business given in that example create highly exclusive swimming pool designs that are only affordable to a tiny percentage of the world population.   Of the visitors to their website (coming in from Google Images), it would be surprising if even 1% were the target market.  Therefore, by raising the visibility within Google Images, the chances of getting useful visitors becomes higher.

If you use the Referrers report within A1WebStats you’ll see how many visits you get (from Google Images searchers) within a period of time (e.g. a month).   If the number is quite small (and you see the value on using images to bring traffic to your website) then you need to identify ways to boost your visibility in Google Images (again, ask us how if you’re not sure).

Probably the simplest modification we can make to the tracking code is to modify the "trackPageView" call so that it records a pageview of a page we specify rather than its default behavior of reading the URL from the address bar.

Common reasons for making this change include:

• turning what would normally be events (like button clicks) into goals - only pageviews or virtual pageviews can be set up as goals
• including extra information in the pageview such as information contained in an anchor (e.g. index.html#anchor)

In your page your using

Google Analytics

Google Analytics Usage Statistics - Websites using Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers a host of compelling features and benefits for everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to site owners and content developers.

Net-Results

Net-Results Usage Statistics - Websites using Net-Results

Marketing automation software.

Hope this helps,Thomas

[iain]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for your thorough and very useful answer.

I'm sorry I got a little confused with the Google Images part but essentially are you saying that I should try to place a 301 redirect on the page? It seems to be a very small error. Is there any real downside from me leaving as it is?

Thanks again (and sorry for the stupidity of the follow-up!)

Cheers

Iain

[AndersS]

Hi!

I don't think that is the case in this occasion, as there is actually an A-tag (with just "." as anchor text) at the page www.datasat.com/mining/tetra-networks-for-mining.html pointing towards http://www.datasat.com/tetra/white-paper.htmlWEhjdAfgkh (look in page source at line number 63)

Removing that link would really fix the whole issue...

Anders

[AndersS]

Hi Iain.

You could just fix the error on the www.datasat.com/mining/tetra-networks-for-mining.html page. If you'd like, you could also do a 301 from http://www.datasat.com/tetra/white-paper.htmlWEhjdAfgkh to http://www.datasat.com/tetra/white-paper.html, but I don't think there's really any need for that.

[iain]

Hi Anders,

Thanks for that.

Iain