How To Get Full Referral & Content URLs From Google Analytics

While cruising through the standard reports in Google Analytics (GA), you may have noticed that you can only get URIs (the part of the URL that follows the domain, AKA hostname). You can’t get the full URLs. That can be pretty unhelpful. So, I’m going to show you some tricks to pull full URLs into your GA reports in an export-friendly format.

Helpful Export Tip

Before you even get started creating these reports, you’ll need to know how to get all of the rows from your report into your export. The GA interface caps you out at 500 rows. However, to get more, just look at the bottom-right corner of your report to see how many rows you have.

Then, choose 25 from the “Show rows” drop-down. At the very end of the report URL, you’ll see this: table.rowCount%3D25. This tells GA that you want 25 rows. Change 25 to however many rows you need in your export — which would be 6001, in my case.

Get Full Referral URLs

This isn’t immediately apparent, but if you’re in the Referrals report (Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals), the standard report is set up so that if you click on one of the referral sources, you’ll see the URI(s) visitors clicked through from.

Click for larger image

However, if you export the report (by clicking Export from the top navigation bar), you’re only going to get the URIs for the referral source you clicked on, not the sources and not the URIs for any of the other referral sources. Not very useful.

If you want the full URLs, you’ll need to create a custom report. If you’re not comfortable with creating a custom report in GA, I created a video walkthrough. You’ll never want to suffer the confines of standard reports again.

Here’s how I set up my custom report:

Click for larger image

Or, you can apply it to your own GA account by using this share link. Important: make sure you’re logged in to GA when you open the link — or copy it into a browser where you’re logged in. Otherwise, you’ll get a 404 error.

Pro Tip: If you want to create a pivot table with both the referral source and the full URL, use this custom report. This custom report will give you the ability to create a pivot table that lists the full referral URLs under the source to easily group multiple links from the same site. Your pivot table would look something like this:

Source:- Search Engine Land

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Google Panda Two Years Later: Losers Still Losing & One Real Recovery

Two years ago today, Google sent shockwaves through not only the SEO industry, but also through online publishing in general when it launched the Panda algorithm update.

It was originally called the “farmer” update because Google’s prime target was “content farms,” a name used to describe sites that created high-quantities of low-quality content that sometimes ranked highly in Google’s search results. Although Google didn’t specifically say it was targeting content farms when Panda launched, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, told us at the time: “I think people will get the idea of the types of sites we’re talking about.”

People did.

And Google’s targets became more obvious in the days after Panda launched when several search and software companies began issuing lists of winners and losers — websites that had been hurt or helped by Google’s algorithm change.

Of course, for every loser that lost search visibility, there’s also a winner that gained search visibility. But few of those winners have spoken out in the two years since Panda.

As you’ll see below, on a list of nearly two dozen of Panda’s original losers, only two websites have returned to the SEO visibility that they had about three weeks post-Panda. The others have all continued to lose search visibility.

Some other Panda-hit websites have recovered, though not all of those recoveries have been permanent. We’ll look at all that later in this article. First, some background.

Background: Panda’s Original Winners & Losers

It only took two days for the first look at Panda’s winners and losers to come in. Companies like Searchmetrics, Sistrix and others used their own tools and data to tell which websites lost or gained visibility in Google’s search results. Though these reports are far from official, many of the sites impacted eventually stepped forward to confirm that they were hit.

Panda’s early winners included several major content destinations like YouTube and Wikipedia, plus large brands like eBay and Amazon. Hundreds of other sites, big and small, no doubt saw their visibility go up as others were hurt. As I said above, for every loser that drops out of Google’s search results, there has to be a winner replacing it.

Our reports on Panda’s early losers listed hundreds of sites; here are some that were commonly included:

• EzineArticles.com
• HubPages.com
• AssociatedContent.com
• Mahalo.com
• Examiner.com
• Suite101.com
• Buzzle.com
• Squidoo.com
• Buzzillions.com

You might’ve expected to see some of Demand Media’s sites on that list, but they were largely left off the first lists of Panda losers. More on that in a moment.

How Are The Panda Losers Now?

In a nutshell: Still losing.

In fact, some of Panda’s losers no longer exist and others have completely changed their name and/or business model. That’s the topic of tomorrow’s article.

We recently asked Searchmetrics to go back to one of its original lists of Panda losers from two years ago, and run its same “SEO Visibility” report on some of them. The company did that last week, and provided loads of information. (Note: We also contacted Sistrix with a similar request, but didn’t receive a reply in time for inclusion in this article.)

Searchmetrics looked at 22 Panda losers and compared their visibility in Google’s search results at three points:

1. Before Panda (February 20, 2011)
2. After Panda (March 13, 2011)
3. Now (February 17, 2013)

The results? None of the 22 sites has returned to its pre-Panda visibility, and only two sites have improved their visibility today compared to their post-Panda visibility.

Here’s a spreadsheet that Searchmetrics shared with us (you can click to see a larger version):

(Note: The numbers reflect Searchmetrics’ “SEO Visibility” score, which doesn’t reflect estimated traffic losses, but instead reflects how visible a domain is in Google’s search results across millions of keywords that the company tracks.)

In the image above, the key columns are to the far right: H and I. The way to read it is this: Suite101.com has seen its SEO visibility drop 96 percent since before Panda and has dropped 81 percent from its post-Panda visibility.

If you browse down column I, you’ll only see two sites with a positive number: Both MerchantCircle.com and Business.com have rebounded enough to have their current SEO visibility score be better than it was after Panda launched. But, as column H shows, both are both still far less visible than they were before Panda came along — as are all of the other 20 sites in this Searchmetrics list.

The SEO visibility chart for Business.com, shown below, is an eye-opener.

Panda’s impact is obvious in February 2011, and the site’s visibility looks like a seesaw after that. It appears to have won back visibility in late 2011 or early 2012, around the time of Panda 9or 10. It’s bounced a few times since then and today is doing a little better than it was right after Panda, but nowhere near pre-Panda visibility.

What About Demand Media Sites?

They’re not included above because, for the most part, they weren’t originally among the big Panda losers.

The company’s flagship site, eHow.com — a site that many associated with the term “content farm” — was actually reported to have gained visibility when Panda launched. That didn’t last long, though; eHow was hit a couple months later when Google rolled out Panda 2.0. Searchmetrics’ chart shows eHow gaining visibility in February 2011 when Panda launched, but losing it in April 2011.

Although the site’s visibility appears to have gained a bit since September 2012, it’s still down 63 percent in Searchmetrics’ SEO visibility score compared to pre-Panda levels.

Another Demand Media site, Livestrong.com, spent much of 2012 on the rebound from Panda.

Searchmetrics says its SEO visibility dropped 35 percent in the first few weeks post-Panda — far less than some of the others mentioned above. But, as the chart below shows, it not only rebounded in 2012, but also far exceeded its SEO visibility … at least until the latter portion of the year.

After regaining visibility all year long, it appears that Livestrong was hit hard by Panda Update 22in late November. It’s been dropping ever since. Today, Livestrong.com is about 13 percent below its pre-Panda visibility.

Panda hurt Demand Media: A year ago, the Los Angeles Times reported that Panda was to blame for Demand suffering a $6.4 million loss in Q4 of 2011.

But just last week, in its latest earnings report, Demand Media said that page views were up 24 percent in 2012 (compared to 2011) on its owned and operated websites, “driven primarily by strong traffic growth on eHow.com and Livestrong.com.” In the statement, CEO Richard Rosenblatt said the company “improved content quality” in 2012 and is “now prepared to significantly increase our content investments in 2013.”

Despite that optimism, Demand Media’s sites appear to be a mixed bag at this point in terms of post-Panda recovery.

At least one other site, however, has done better.

MotorTrend.com: A True Panda Recovery

Motor Trend is a long-running magazine with a presumably trusted website, and its annual “Car of the Year” award is about as prestigious as it gets in the auto industry. I’m not a Motor Trend reader, nor have I ever spent quality time on the MotorTrend.com website. So, I can’t speak to whether it deserved to get hit by Panda. But it certainly did, as this Searchmetrics chart shows:

MotorTrend.com was obviously hit in the initial Panda update, then recovered in July 2011 around the time of Panda 5. It dropped again with Panda 7 — and we mentioned it in our coverage — then quickly recovered again a couple weeks later with Panda 8.

Source:- Search Engine Land

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7 SEO Tasks That Are Wasting Your Time

As a website owner or SEO, your time is limited. So why on earth would you waste on outdated tactics that are entirely unnecessary in today’s digital marketing environment? If you’re still carrying out any of the following SEO tasks, stop. There are too many other important areas to focus your attention on than to waste time using these techniques! 

Task #1: Checking Your Traffic Every Day 

While the number of visitors arriving on your pages is a useful metric to measure, it’s easy to find yourself sucked into the rabbit hole of obsessively monitoring the entrance and exit of every single visitor that checks out your site. Not only does this limit the amount of time you’re able to spend on the Web marketing tasks that actually have the potential to improve your site’s traffic, endlessly checking your visitor counts doesn’t really provide any meaningful information for your promotional campaigns. 

After all, you could receive thousands upon thousands of visitors to your site, but if you aren’t actively engaging these visitors, they aren’t likely to result in sales or leads. Instead, look at traffic from a trend standpoint. If you’re doing things right, your visitor numbers will go up; if you’re doing things wrong, visitor counts will fall. Use these general trends as a barometer that lets you know whether or not you’re on the right course—and nothing more. 

 Task #2: Buying Backlink Packages 

Nope. Just stop. Even though recent Google algorithm updates have made it pretty clear that the search giant intends to stamp out and devalue the worthless backlink schemes that have helped plenty of unworthy sites gain top positions in the SERPs, there are still companies out there that are selling “10,000 backlinks for $10” packages. 

 It can be tempting to take this easy road, instead of spending hours upon hours chasing the few legitimate link building opportunities that are available for any given site. But don’t let yourself be swayed! Putting all of your link building eggs in this unstable basket is only going to lead to disappointment when your backlinks are devalued and your site penalized in the search results. 

 Task #3: Monitor Keyword Density 

In the past, plenty of SEOs went around proclaiming ideal on-page keyword densities of everything from 1 to 20 percent. As a result, gullible SEOs spent hours using automated tools to measure existing densities and rewrite content to some sort of arbitrary standard—all in an ill-fated attempt to secure top search ranking positions. 

Obviously, keyword density as a ranking signal has no merit in today’s SEO world. Is it a good idea to include target keywords in key places, like your title tag and heading tags? Sure! But otherwise, it’s a far better idea to focus your attention on creating content that sounds natural than to worry about the number of times you’ve included your target keywords in your site’s body text. 

 Task #4: Submitting Articles to Directories 

Old school SEOs should be well familiar with the promotional tactic of submitting articles to directories for the purposes of building both traffic and backlinks. Over time, though, a number of different factors have come together to completely invalidate this strategy. 

First, plenty of article directories—conscious of the way webmasters were abusing their services for personal gain—switched over to “nofollow” links, negating the link building benefit of article directory submissions. Then, Google came along and knocked many of these directories’ articles out of the SERPs as part of the Panda update, minimizing the amount of traffic webmasters utilizing this technique were able to receive. The result? A promotional strategy that no longer offers a real SEO benefit and that should be wiped from your SEO task list entirely. 

Task #5: Checking Your Rankings 

Obsessively Yes, we all know that achieving high rankings in the natural search results is a primary objective for SEO marketers. However, if you’re spending all of your time monitoring your current search placements, you’re wasting time that would be better spent on the techniques that will actually make a difference in your ability to rank highly! Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind that high search rankings are only one part of a website’s success. 

Earning a Top 10 spot in the Google results doesn’t mean much on its own, especially if you aren’t effectively converting the traffic that results from this placement into leads or customers! So yes, check your rankings periodically, as movement up or down the SERPs is a good general indicator of whether your marketing techniques are positively or negatively affecting Google’s perception of your website. Otherwise, leave off the obsessive rankings monitoring to focus on the techniques that really matter to your success. 

 Task #6: Spinning Articles 

Spinning articles used to be a big deal to digital marketers, with website owners investing tons of money in tools to automate the process and writers who could draft content using the unique syntax required by spinning programs. But if you’re still allocating your business’s limited funds to article spinning, it’s time to stop! Spinning articles rarely produces anything other than the thin content that’s likely to land your site on Google’s chopping block. It’s an outdated technique. 

Plus, it’s one that’s entirely unnecessary, given that a single, well-written article published as a reputable guest post will do more for your site’s performance than a thousand spun articles published on devalued article directories ever will! 

 Task #7: Sculpting Your Site’s PageRank 

Finally, another outdated SEO task that should be cut out of your Web marketing “to do” list entirely is the obsessive sculpting of on-site PageRank. Now, I’m not saying that you should pay attention to the way you’re using “nofollow” tags on outgoing or sponsored links on your site (especially since failing to handle the flow of PageRank to paid ads that link out from your site correctly can result in penalties for the advertisers). 

However, if you’re still engaging in the practice of meticulously redirecting the flow of PageRank from your “unimportant” pages to your “important” content, you’re wasting your time! And just in case you don’t want to take my word on this, check out information published by Matt Cutts as early as June 2009, indicating that this strategy wasn’t a useful one for webmasters. Take the time you’ve been spending on this unnecessary task and redirect it to strategies that’ll actually make a difference in your site’s performance. 

Once you’ve eliminated these seven tasks from your SEO activities, use the time you’ve freed up on the strategies that actual will produce a measurable improvement in your website’s results, including everything from split testing to legitimate link building techniques and more. By realigning your efforts in this way and avoiding the outdated tactics that can actually bring your website harm, you’ll stand to see much more online success over time. 

What do you think? Are you still engaging in any of these outdated SEO tasks? Or are there others you’ve given up on because they don’t produce results for your site? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below! 

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Evlakhov Valeriy
Content Source: - search engine journal

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Matt Cutts on Finding Untrustworthy Links, Why Google Won't Kill Toolbar PageRank

Google has released two new videos in its popular Webmaster Help series that shed new light on a couple of hot topics in the SEO industry: how to you identify unnatural links and why Google wont switch off the PageRank Toolbar feature.

Identifying Unnatural Links

After the rollout of the Penguin algorithm in April 2012, the infamous unnatural link warnings were sent by Google. It quickly became clear to SEO professionals that they would need to delete or dilute to comply with Google’s webmaster guidelines. But one question has plagued the industry ever since: “how do I know which links to remove?”

A new video by Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts announces that Google will soon begin supplying example links that were detected as being untrustworthy.

“A feature that we’re working on and that we are in the process of rolling out, which I’m pretty excited about, is that we will basically give you examples. So as we’re building the incident, whenever a webmaster analyst is saying 'OK, these are links not to trust,' we’ll include an example link. You might get one, you might two, you might get three, but basically it will give you an idea of the sorts of links that we are no longer trusting.”
Cutts goes on to give a few specific examples of types of links that could trigger the warning, including:

Too many widget links
Keyword-rich anchor text links 
Article directories 
Paid links
While many methods for identifying unnatural links have surfaced, Google’s new example links will give SEO professionals and webmasters more information on exactly what is triggering the warnings.

On an interesting side note, Cutts states that a “webmaster analyst” reviews and qualifies inbound links, which implies that human employees are reviewing and approving or flagging inbound links.

Here's the full video:

Source - search engine journal

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