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Google Analytics Shows internal pages as landing pages

In Google Analytics Site Content | Landing Pages lists several internal pages of my site. But there's no normal way, that I can think of, for people to land on those pages. The Thank You page is listed, for example, but it's only reached after finishing a payment transaction. How can it be listed as a landing page? Someone would have to specifically enter into their browser "www.mysite.com/ThankYou.php."

Thanks for any ideas.

Steve

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todd_beedy

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freshcontent

If someone put a bookmark link in their desktop browser that pointed to the thank you page (as their link to your website), they might use that as their jumping off point to return to your website.

I can think of several times where I've bookmarked a page after purchasing access to a website and rather than take the time to update my link, just go there and jump into the page that I really want from that page.

The other reason might be if you included that page in your sitemap file that you give to search engines, or if you have a publicly accessible sitemap that includes that page, Google/Bing may crawl the sitemap and find the page that way.

Hope that helps. Let me know of follow-up questions.

steva

ASKER

Thanks for the inputs. I guess the solution to keeping your pages from coming back to someone in a Google search is to set up your robots.txt file to exclude the page, so it never gets indexed. Unfortunately, it seems to already be indexed. (I didn't send Google a sitemap, so Google found it by itself.)

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