Comments on: Double slashes in Analytics URLs

By: tom3k

tom3k — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:38:21 +0000

oh my!

could it be? a solution to one of those problems if been scratching my head over for about… oh a year now??!

guess i wont know until 20 hours from now, but this looks promising!

thanks regardless!

mid comment update:

CURSES!

the one time that i figure this out, turns out ga is updating their system (as has been stated on the site for a week now)…

We’re sorry.

We are currently undergoing system maintenance.

Please try again later – we’ll bring the system back up as soon as we can.

LOL!

but yea, this looks very promising :)

thanks again!

By: Joe O'Connell

Joe O'Connell — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 07:06:55 +0000

Kudos and thank you! I recently encountered a similar problem that started “all of a sudden” in my analytics account. Sure enough, it started the day I edited my site profile’s default page setting (among many other things I modified that day). This post clued me to correlate, and now it is fixed.

By: Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:46:23 +0000

Gavin – many, many thanks. It looks like this is probably a large part of the problem. I’ve added an update to the post. Thanks again!

By: Gavin Doolan

Gavin Doolan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:56:21 +0000

Also double check your Google Analytics default page setting.

If you use a / forward slash sometimes it can be represented in GA as // incorrectly.

The default page field is for websites where say /index.php and / are the same. You would enter /index.php so it would be aggregated together with / and pageviews would be combined.

By: Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:23:50 +0000

Gotcha, thanks. I guess I’m just used to REQUEST_URI and so on…

By: Thomas Scholz

Thomas Scholz — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:22:23 +0000

THE_REQUEST contains the full request line (method, request URI and query string), e.g.: GET /foo//bar?find=a//b So ^[A-Z]+\ matches the request method (POST, GET … DELETE ;)). And no, I haven,'t explained this in my blog post. Maybe I should.

By: Thomas Scholz

Thomas Scholz — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:43:37 +0000

Yes, .htaccess is the better way. It catches images and other non PHP files too. And it’s faster.

I wrote the plugin just for people without mod_rewrite.

By: Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:42:49 +0000

Thomas, I am slightly confused by the .htaccess code provided on your post. Maybe it’s explained in the German copy, but why one or more caps-only letters at the start? (i.e. ^[A-Z]+). And why the space character before the first forward slash?

By: Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:37:39 +0000

Many thanks Thomas. I take it the .htaccess directives are deemed the better solution? As I mentioned above, I’ve not included this for now, but I might add it to be safe. Good to have a link to reliable code for this.

By: Thomas Scholz

Thomas Scholz — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:54:48 +0000

I’ve described this problem (in German) in my blog two months ago: http://toscho.de/2009/wordpress-2-8-3-das-doppelslash-problem/

There you’ll find two different solutions: a regex for your .htaccess and a plugin.

Hope that helps.