Dramatic Increase in referrals from own website
-
The past few weeks I've been wracking my brain to figure out why on earth my branded searches could be dropping off at 30-40%. Well today, I realize I've had a dramatic increase in referrals from my own site (the non www verison). I'm talking 150 in March of last year to 5k in March of this year drastic. My 301 redirects haven't changed as far as I know -- I've had them set to redirect from the non www. to the www. for at least a year or two. I'm assuming visitors from search engines are somehow getting the non www version and the redirect is attributing the traffic to referrals instead of search. The drop in search traffic and the increase in referral traffic fall on the same day.
Does that sound right/possible? If so, how do I fix this? My traffic stats for two clients are all screwy because of this. I want to make sure whatever solution I implement won't hurt my search traffic numbers any more
Has anyone else seen this happen recently? I could imagine an anomaly with one site but I find it odd that it could be two client sites. I still have some others to check.
Thanks in advance!
Leslie
-
Thanks so much for the clarity. This place is awesome! Getting with my developer to work out this issue.
-
Thanks so much for helping me out on this! That makes a lot of sense. Getting with my developer to check on the redirects!
Leslie
-
Leslie,
Indeed KTaylor is on to something. There is no 301 redirect, but instead there is a JavaScript redirect in place. Using Firefox with JavaScript disabled the site does not redirect.
The GA snippet is likely firing in some cases before the redirect happens.
-
I loaded your website while using httpfox which views all of the information being loaded through my browser. I don't see a 301 redirect happening. Now, this is really over the edge of my technical expertise, but I can tell you for certain that a 301 redirect doesn't appear to be working. However, people are being redirected in some fashion from non-www to www.
I can also see that my original request to http://longboatkeyclub.com is being aborted, rather than triggering the 301. After the aforementioned request is being aborted, there are several other calls to the non-www. that are being aborted (some examples below) before the www. page begins to load:
<colgroup><col width="64"></colgroup>
http://longboatkeyclub.com/scripts/dateUpdater.js http://longboatkeyclub.com/scripts/expandContract_mainNav.js http://longboatkeyclub.com/scripts/showGallery.js
I think a first start would be to dig into the 301 redirect and confirm its setup, because it's not working from my side and I'm not getting a 301 status anywhere when trying to access your non-www site. Hopefully someone more technical than I will chime in and provide a specific solution.
|
-
The self referral is coming from "longboatkeyclub.com" exactly.
-
Hi Leslie,
Care to share the site URL? One issue that frequently causes self referrals to sites is missing a Google Analytics tag (or whatever web analytics tool you're using) on one page of a site. If you are, in fact, using Google Analytics, you should be able to see the specific URL that is referring traffic to you by viewing your referring sources report. That should help you pinpoint whether it's the redirect or something else.
-
I apologize for typo! racking
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website excluded from indexing, google-selected canonical: N/A
The google search console revealed to me that none of my pages was indexed, all pages are listed in the 'excluded' section "duplicate, google chose different canonical than user".
Reporting & Analytics | | Fibigrus
But in the URL-inspection tab it shows me google-selected canonical: N/A Indexing and crawling is both allowed. Don't know how to get my pages to be indexed correctly. (by the way, they do NOT exist in other languages, so that can't be a reason why google might think they are a duplicate. There's definitively no other version of those pages available)0 -
My website has been declining in rankings!
Hello everyone, I have been doing the SEO on the following site: www.painters-decorators-london.co.uk for the past few years and the rankings are slowly declining since last year. (not the recent Google update). I can't seem to figure out what exactly is causing this to happen The page authority and domain authority is higher than my competitors. The on page SEO I believe is done appropriately but I'm not sure whats causing this decline. How can I find out exactly using the MOZ Pro account that I have. I don't think I'm totally aware of the important metrics that one can use on this site to determine the problem. Please advise!
Reporting & Analytics | | Ready2Paint0 -
Google Webmaster Tools, about multiple entries for your website
Hi I have a doubt about Google Webmaster Tools or Central as it is call today. I remember that google recommended to have one profile of your website for each domain structure. Let me try to be more clear one profile for http://www.yoursite.com, an other for http://yoursite.com, an other for https://www.yoursite.com, etc. Then in each of them we uploaded our sitemaps and cross our fingers. Now from my experience always the complete url have better index status from the sitemap. Now my question is, today as Google requested all our websites run under https, so conserving the other profiles is affecting how google index our pages? shall we have to delete the old profiles or is better to maintain them? Thanks. Pablo
Reporting & Analytics | | FWC_SEO0 -
Can you tell MUV data on websites using MOZ?
I want to write reports on other websites and need to know MUV data on them
Reporting & Analytics | | WeAreVillage0 -
Google Images referral visits fell off a cliff
As of 28-Jan, referral traffic from Google images (/imgres) to my domain has pretty much vaporized. Visits are down 85%. It's actually not a disaster because most of those visits were from poorly optimized alt tags that were resulting in low quality visits. The interesting thing is that visit duration is up 80% during the same period. So I'm asking this question out of curiosity more than anything. Is this likely an algorithm tweak? I can't think of any major changes on my end. There's only one other data point to mention but I don't see how they'd be connected. I did two PRWEB releases on 29-Jan and 30-Jan that resulted in a few hundred new no-follow links back to my site. 22b7k2.png
Reporting & Analytics | | JonDiPietro0 -
Do i need a new dedicated server to increase my website speed
Hi, i have been talking to my hosting company about my site. I am having major problems with the speed of the site. My site is www.in2town.co.uk Ever since i had to redesign my site after a major mistake was made by the hosting company, my site has been running slow and i have tried everything to sort this out including moving to a dedicated server. The trouble is nothing is working and now my hosting companny have told me that i need a new dedicated server which will make it faster. My site is in joomla and the hosting company have told me that the dedicated server below will make the site run faster, but shall i trust them or find another hosting company. Intel i3 540 3.06 Ghz HT 4MB S-Cache $219/mo $289/month500GBStorage6GBRAM10TBBandwidthI am using the following to test the speed of my site http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/r0spOGObd/www.in2town.co.uk and http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.in2town.co.uk/kVV1mTDcThe trouble i have is, when you try loading the home page it is slow and when you try moving around the site it is slow.Can anyone please give me some advice.
Reporting & Analytics | | ClaireH-1848860 -
What should I expect after completely redoing a website?
Hello Forum, My team and I have completely redone an eCommerce website, which offers new SEO-friendly URLs. We have also taken care to optimize our product and category pages for specific keywords, so as to keep our regular traffic and increase the long-tail. In the old un-optimized website, many of its Google search results simply took users to the homepage, thus the homepage has a lot of external link juice. Our new site is optimized so that users are taken to the page most relevant to their query. For example (we are a yoga site), with the old site a search for "yoga bolsters" would take visitors to the homepage. Now the search results take the users to the yoga bolster page. These new pages don't have the amount of external links as the new site and I've noticed a decrease in our site's average rank in Google Webmaster Tools 1.Given our new site with its new URLs, should this increase be expected? (we have implemented 301 redirects from the old site to the new) 2. What steps would you take to ensure you keep your rankings with the new site? Are they any special tools you recommend? 3. What the best way to increase the ones that have dropped? Page optimization? Link building? Both?
Reporting & Analytics | | pano2 -
Strange increase in Direct traffic in Google analytics
For past 2 weeks, several of our sites have strange increase in direct traffic in Google Analytics. we also have another tracking code, and in this account we don't have any big changes, so this is very strange what is happening. We didn't changed any codes, and none of the changes were done to application. Any ideas why this is happening? z7ME9.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | InformMedia0