Google analytics giving data for pages that dont' exist

Question

We switched from a PHP application to a Rails application last week. I ran daily reports and everything looked fine. When I ran a weekly content report it gave me data for index.php which doesnt exist anymore. The funny thing is that is looks spot on for page views. This also made me wonder how analytics would record "/" in a Rails app. I ran it through Fiddler, there is no redirect just a 404. I view source on the 404 and there is no tracking code.

I am pretty baffled. Anyone know what could be going on ?

Answer 1

We saw the same thing a few weeks ago. We got a massive surge of traffic reported that had nothing to do with our site.

The following URL might help:

http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2011/06/are-rogue-sites-influencing-your-google-analytics-data/

Answer 2

Heres what I figured out. If I have a route in rails like /life/announcements and you put in /life/announcements.php Rails seems to ignore the .php. And though I haven't been able to recreate it for index.php, if you goto /index you get the index so following the above example /index.php would give you /index So analytics is just tracking the url whether Rails is ignoring the .php or not.