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I have been looking through some reports on Google Analytics and if I go to CONTENT > Site Content > Pages and filter by Page Title my highest visits Page Title is (not set).

If I drill down into this to find the pages responsible they are all pages with titles (and indeed pretty much all of them are returned by the Page Title view with their titles).

I started playing about with the site trying to view it in various ways with different things enabled and disabled in order to see if I could ever make the title not appear on the pages listed, I just couldn't.

Has anyone come across this before and could provide me with a set of next steps in order to see what is happening.

I have checked the advice given in this question and can report that the tracking code as not been altered in any way that would have logic to create this.

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This usually comes when users view your site via Google's cache, or another source that scrapes your content. In Google's case they create a page with the header saying "this is a snapshot of the page" but then import your HTML directly underneath that (rather than using a frame). Analytics can't find the title tag since the HTML ends up as a bad mess.

However, I've never seen such a large proportion of "not set" as that so it's possible someone else is scraping your content and removing the title tag, but keeping the GA snippet for some reason.

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  • I tried to follow up on the idea that someone could be scraping content, but if they are it isn't being indexed in any of the bigger search engines. We are going to filter those results for now and keep doing more research into this.
    – Toby
    Nov 20, 2011 at 12:35
  • @Toby are you sure your pages have correct title tags? Do you have any example URLs for which GA is showing this error? Nov 20, 2011 at 17:12
  • starplanbedrooms.com/ranges/view/kids-bedrooms is one such page, and I have tried accessing it various ways to try and make the title tag not appear but I just cannot.
    – Toby
    Nov 26, 2011 at 21:14
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It is possible that the page title is set dynamically after dom is loaded, so initially the title is not set. So google analytics is tracking the pageview twice, once with title not set and then after title is set.

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  • This was not the case, thanks for the idea though.
    – Toby
    Apr 27, 2013 at 8:16

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