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Google Webmaster Tools Redirects & Inconsistent Analytics Data

Hi everyone,

I recently helped a customer with an issue she was having where Google Webmaster Tools would throw a redirect error and not index her pages appropriately when requested. Additionally, her Google Analytics statistics were significantly lower than what Weebly was showing on the site's dashboard. I found the issue, updated the snippet code, and everything is working fine now. I hope this can help at least one other person who may be having issues!

What caused the issue?

The primary cause was that the Google Analytics code (configured in the footer area in Settings and used to verify ownership of the site with Webmaster Tools) was configured to only report on non-www traffic.

Because of this, Google only registered direct visits to the site without www (eg. weebly.com) and ignored those that directed toward www (eg. www.weebly.com). Because the site and DNS records were configured with www, this caused a consistent redirect in the eyes of Webmaster tools and thus indexing would fail—don't ask my why they can't properly detect that.

Anyway, you'll want to be sure that your Analytics snippet that you put on your Weebly has the following line in it. You can verify this by looking at the code you've dropped into the footer area via the Settings tab within the Weebly editor.

imageimportant: note the 'auto' attribute

This is the default snippet configuration, but I've seen this differ a few times now and it's always good to make sure you're generating your snippet from GA, here:

imageFound under the "Admin" tab

Because you can't predict user behavior (and most people don't type in www, but search results will default to your DNS configuration) it's best to support both non-www and www traffic in this way.

Anyway, that's it. I hope this helps someone out there!

James

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Hi James,

Thanks for your feedback and for letting us know how you fixed your issue. This could be very helpful for someone else having the same issue Smiley Happy 

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