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
-
Time For New Website To Rank?
We've been working on a site for the past couple months and going to be launching in a couple weeks. How long does it take for Google to establish a "stabilized" ranking for the site and various pages? The main homepage will have its targeted keywords and each product page will have its own targeted keywords. We have about 100 total pages for the site. I know rankings may fluctuate initially but trying to get an idea of when the rankings are stabilized before we start working on the ongoing SEO like earning backlinks, changing on-page optimization, etc to be able to track changes in rankings over time.
Reporting & Analytics | | vikasnwu0 -
Can a 100% bounce rate page hurt whole website?
Hello, So with trying to figure out what I can do to better my website, I noticed a post on here that mentioned bounce rates. So I went to my Google analytics pages and listed my bounce rates. My average is 44% But I have a picture page that is 100% and a contact page that is 80% Can pages like this cause an algo penalty that could hurt a whole site? Thank you for your valuable insights
Reporting & Analytics | | Berner0 -
Paid Search Referral
I have a brand new site with a paid search referral in my G&A, but we are not running any adwords or any paid marketing for it. The referral is "not set" so I do not know where it is coming from.
Reporting & Analytics | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Referral Traffic vs. Campaign Traffic in Google Analytics
I have two sites: a blog and an ecommerce site. The blog funnels people to the ecommerce site. In Analytics I'm seeing declines in referral traffic from the blog to the ecommerce site. During the same time I'm seeing an increase in campaign traffic to the ecommerce site, with most campaign traffic coming from the blog. I believe the increase in campaign traffic is largely a result of simply having installed more tracking links. This leads me to believe that the declines I'm seeing in referral traffic is simply a result of the increase in campaign traffic. In other words, what was once counted and reported as being referral traffic is now being counted and reported as campaign traffic. So my question is this: In Google Analytics is campaign traffic ALSO reported as referral traffic, or is campaign traffic reported separately and not duplicated in referral traffic reports? I'll provide a concrete example to make this more clear in case it isn't: Say site X sends 1000 visits each month to site Y. Say 50 of those visits come from a single link on X. If that link is changed so that campaign Z data info added (via the Google URL Builder), would you expect to then see 950 referral visits each month from site X to site Y plus 50 campaign visits to site Y via new campaign Z, or would you continue to see 1000 referral visits plus the new 50 campaign visits? Many thanks in advance to anyone that can shed some light on this.
Reporting & Analytics | | aaronprimal0 -
Open internal links in a new tab increase bonus rate?
Hello! This week I used a simple method to reduce my blog Google Analytics bounce rate. My blog all the posts are guides, in order to follow them, user need to download a zip file (same zip file). Otherwise they can't. Therefore I added a separate blog post to download all the necessary files. As a result of that I can reduce my bounce rate from 62-70% to 45-50% level. Now I'm thinking to open that zip file download page in a new tab. If I open my blog zip file download page, in a new tab. It will again increase my bounce rate? I reduced my bounce rate using that zip file download page. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Godad0 -
Why would a website rank lower than weaker site?
Hi, Today I noticed that my website is ranking one place lower than a competitor in Google UK ,despite my site having a stronger domain authority and page authority. Is there a plausible reason for this, i'm slightly confused? Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Benjamin3790 -
Distribution of SEOMOZ Ranking Metrics across all Monitored Websites
Hi, I'm looking into building a tool which would incorporate SEOMOZ ranking metrics and I have a few questions with regard to the ranking data which will help me develop it correctly. I have done a few searches, for the information but haven't found an answer to these questions on seomoz - if they exist somewhere then I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction. 1/. When looking at the values of metrics such as MozRank and DA, is there any information on how this values are distributed amongst the ranked website - EG The mean / median values of DA and MozRank etc of all websites monitored is X & Y . If there were any distribution graphs for these values then even better. 2/. Along the lines of the above - are there any online resources showing similar information for google PR? 3/. What is the calcuation used in the scale of MozRank and DA - ie We have a scale of 1-10 for these values - be we also know the scale in not linear but logrithmic - ie Double the Links of a DA 5 website and you would not end up with a DA 10 website - so what is the calculation which defines the scale. A WBF about google PR by Rand indicated that a value of between 8-9 is used in Google PR - but what about the values used for DA and MozRank etc? Many thanks for your help
Reporting & Analytics | | James770 -
Open explorer is not finding my website information yet?
Majestic SEO and even yahoo sitemap see's it... why not SEOMOZ? The website is a few months old already. www.lackofsleephq.com
Reporting & Analytics | | sleepmaster0