No-indexed pages are still showing up as landing pages in Google Analytics

[mztobias]

Hello,

My website is a local job board. I de-indexed all of the job listing pages on my site (anything that starts with http://www.localwisejobs.com/job/).

When I search site:localwisejobs.com/job/, nothing shows up. So I think that means the pages are not being indexed.

When I look in Google Analytics at Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Landing Pages, none of the job listing pages show up.

But when I look at Acquisition > Channels > Organic and then click Landing Page as the primary dimension, the /job pages show up in there.

Why am I seeing this discrepency in Organic Landing pages? And why would the /job pages be showing up as landing pages even though they aren't indexed?

[Carson-Ward]

I generally recommend meta noindex without blocking via robots.txt for reasons like this.

First, click secondary dimension and check out source / medium. Are they coming from Google? If all you did was use the remove tool on Google Webmaster Tools, Bing/Yahoo don't get the message yet.

Search engines cannot see a noindex tag  on the page if they're blocked from crawling the page. They can't access the page to read the tag. So it can sit around in the index despite not having been crawled for a while. (Though usually it's removed eventually).

Also keep in mind that you see some landing page traffic from instances where GA fails to fire the first time. It's usually a VERY tiny percentage, but I often see traffic to some (virtual pageview) popups that can't even load without entering info on our site (e.g. it's not even a possible landing page).

Might I also ask why you removed the job listing from the index? I was thinking this might be a good time to use rather than blocking crawlers outright. That assumes, of course, that you keep listing up for a fixed time. If you know when the job listing is going to expire, you can just tell the search engine. They might even send some traffic to your individual listings while live.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Not completely relevant, but might be good to be aware of this, the site is serving me a HTTP authentication form to login into your domain on port 80 when I visit the site.

[BradsDeals]

We'd find the landing page in organic landing page reports as something like:
http://www.blablahsitewhatever.com/landingpage?s=bing|display|20150826
instead of 
http://www.blablahsitewhatever.com/landingpage

It's clearly not an organic hit since it came through a paid channel, and yet gets classified as organic. (We got around it by building a custom report for organic landing pages that specifically filters out landing pages with those extra parameters.) So from this we know it's entirely possible for traffic to be misattributed as organic when it's clearly not. But unless you can clearly see it in the URL like that, it's really hard to suss out.

[mztobias]

Thanks Rebecca.  We removed via Manual removal using Google Webmaster Console AND added a noindex entry in robotos.txt. When you say  the "organic landing page had campaign parameters attached specific to paid Bing campaigns" where were these campaign parameters attached? In the URL leading to the page from the paid source or in a link embedded somewhere in the page or in some analytics javascript that was firing somewhere or something else?

[BradsDeals]

How exactly did you do the no-index? Robots.txt? Meta robots tag? Manual removal via Google Webmaster Console?

Beyond that, I have seen some paid traffic misattributed as organic before, which we caught because the organic landing page had campaign parameters attached specific to paid Bing campaigns.