: Domain is being appended to relative paths in all reports One of my inherited projects has the domain name being added to all relative path dimensions in all of my Google Analytics reports.

@Karen161

I was able to go through and change the view settings, filters, and referral exclusion list and it has fixed the problem.

If I was more patient I could have made the changes one at a time, but I can confirm that in this case (even though this is a WordPress site) it was all on the Google Analytics side (and not the website side). Not 100% positive which of the above fixed it, though.

If anyone else has this issue, here's exactly what I did:


View Settings (View): I emptied the "Default Page" field. When creating a new view, this is empty to begin with, but at some point somebody put their domain in there.
Filters (View): They had a find/replace filter in place (Find "^www." in the hostname and replace with nothing), but the verification said it wouldn't affect any traffic, so I'm thinking it was a red herring. I removed it along with some other improper filters.
Referral Exclusion List (Property): It looks like they were attempting to block ghost spambots using this, so I removed the "spambot" domains from the list. They were also missing their own domain. Basically, I emptied this list, and then added their domain to it (which is how it should be by default).


For reference, I added a "Valid Hostname" include filter on this view to only allow data from traffic to their domain (and acceptable others).

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@Jessie594

There are times when it is a setting on WP and Joomla but as of a few years ago, Google has been in fact doing this since at least 2012, but I see it happening more often than not. One thing that has stood out is they tend to do it on Titles that are short

Sometimes they add your URL to the end of a title tag.

As mentioned some have title tags that are short and have a URL at the end. In some cases Google is adding a URL on top of that. Looks like this.....

Keywords at Example.com | eexample.com

Sometimes they replace your title tag with words that match the query.

One person wrote.


I object to this because they have overwritten a title tag that with
my marketing message such as "free shipping" or a kickass price that
pulls in buyers.


One quick way to see how you are showing up is search site:yourSiteName and see in indeed your pages are showing up as such by Google.

Then do the same at Bing/Yahoo. Most likely you are not hacked and you will not see the same happening at Bing/Yahoo.

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