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Hi Martijn,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I've enabled bot filtering on all views except my unfiltered view. My site gets so much bot traffic that the data would be unusable without it.

As for filtering the traffic, I'm not aware of any way to retroactively filter out User-Agent unless I use GTM to create a custom dimension as described here: https://www.addsearch.com/docs/analytics/addsearch-bot-google-analytics/

Perhaps this is something I should do in case something like this ever happens again in the future.
I'm still hoping for other suggestions - particularly ways to ask the Google Analytics team to include "whatstuffwherebot" as part of their bot filtering.

Best,
Akira

Starting yesterday, Aug 26, 2020, I noticed a new bot crawling our site with user agent whatstuffwherebot.

Google Analytics is counting these hits as human traffic, completely throwing off my numbers - yesterday, Analytics reported nearly triple my typical number of visitors.

As of now, Search Console only shows data through Aug 25 so I don't know if Search Console is also affected.

Is anybody else seeing something similar?

Does anybody know what the whatstuffwherebot bot is? I don't get any results when I search on Google or Bing.

For what it's worth, the traffic is coming from Columbus, OH, running over Amazon AWS via 278 different IP addresses so far. Also, WordFence (my WordPress security plugin) correctly identifies these hits as bot traffic.

Dr. Egol - thank you for the thoughtful answer. I'll give it a try!

Considering Google's renewed emphasis on E-A-T, and since Google+ authorship is going away, what is the best practice for establishing authorship of content?

Is it still rel="author" but with a link to one's bio on one's website?

Should this be done on every page of a site? If so, can it be in the footer or would it be more effective immediately below the page content?

Question Deleted

Thanks, Peter. That's useful to know.

I ultimately found an easier solution. My situation is that I'm changing some URLs and I want to keep consistent tracking of my funnels/goals.

So if I changed a URL from say page1.htm to page2.htm, I was thinking I needed to define the associated funnel to be page1.htm OR page2.htm. However, I discovered that if I simply changed the funnel from the former to the latter, all of the historical data for page1.htm would be combined with new data collected for page2.htm. Thus, the logical operator wasn't necessary.

Trenton,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm trying it your way and will test shortly!

Best,

Akira

When setting up a Funnel within Google Analytics, is it possible to use logical operators (e.g. OR, AND) in the first (required) step of the funnel? For example, suppose I want to track users who visit page1.html AND page2.html before proceeding to the destination goal.

I've entered two pages separated by the OR operator, and neither the "Verify this Goal" nor "Save" produces an error message - is it safe to assume that this is working as I intend?

Thanks in advance!

This is happening to me also. Using the latest Outlook in Office 365.

Thanks for all of the responses - this forum is a great resource!

Over 95% of my revenue comes from organic search; less than 5% comes from AdWords PPC (all other sources account for about 1-2%).

My ROI on AdWords is roughly zero. It's negative if you include opportunity costs.

My question is: if I pause all of my AdWords campaigns, is there ANY chance that my organic rankings (and organic click-through rates) will suffer?

This is really two questions. First, could Google retaliate to my reduced ad spending by dropping my rankings? Second, will searchers think differently about my organic link if they don't also see the accompanying paid link on the SERP?

I think Guy Warner nailed it. I wrote the copy for my home page back in 2004. I've tweaked it over the years, but it remained largely the same. During that time, lots of others have been copying the text for their own websites. Now, if you search for an exact match, a few of the other sites come up even higher in the SERP than my own site!

I've done my best to get folks to remove the copies (and serving DMCA complaints when necessary) but I think my time is better spent simply rewriting the home page.

It's frustrating on one hand, but it's also good to finally have an idea of what the problem might be.

Thanks, Guy!

I have some pages on my website that receive an "A" grade with the SEOmoz On Page Report Card if I use a plural term in a phrase (say, "landscape designers in Dallas") but an "F" grade if I use the singular term (say, "landscape designer in Dallas").

Is this a true and accurate reflection of how search engines see the page?

Am I going to rank well for plural terms but not for singular, given the specific on-page content I'm using in this example?

Or is this an opportunity for SEOmoz to tweak its' algorithm to better reflect the search engines?

If you have backlinks pointing to www.etraxc.com/default.asp then using the canonical tag to point to www.etraxc.com/ instead should still be helpful. Or you can do a permanent redirect from the former to the latter.

Over the years, tons of original content from my website (written by me) has been scraped by 200-300 external sites. I've been using Copyscape to identify the offenders. It is EXTREMELY time consuming to identify the site owners, prepare an email with supporting evidence (screen shots), and following up 2, 3, 15 times until they remove the scraped content. Filing DMCA takedowns are a final option for sites hosted in the US, but quite a few of the offenders are in China, India, Nigeria, and other places not subject to DMCA. Sometimes, when a site owner takes down scraped content, it reappears a few months or years later. It's exasperating.

My site already performs well in the SERPs - I'm not aware of a third party site's scraped content outperforming my site for any search phrase.

Given my circumstances, how much effort do you think I should continue to put into policing scraped content?

Good advice, Matt, and thanks for taking a moment to provide an actual data point!

And yes, we definitely take a balanced approach combining on page, off page, PR, social, and more. This just happens to be "on page" day for me.

Question Deleted

Add rel="canonical" href="http://www.etraxc.com/" /> to the header of default.asp.

But first, learn how the canonical tag works so you don't hurt yourself by mistake: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

I've found a solution and am posting it here in case anybody else is having the same problem:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([^/]+)/[0-9]+ /blog/$1/$2/$3/ [L,R=301]