Drop in google referral traffic

[lgrozeva]

Hi guys,

As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini.

What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date.

We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Thanks.

[lgrozeva]

Thanks for your replies.

After some digging I found that since July 2010 the google.* / referral traffic increased dramatically (from 6K to 66K per month), followed by the drop in October 2011.

Almost all of those people are using IE 8 or 9 but nothing specific in terms of location or new / returning.

Is it possible for IE to strip the query after the domain name so it appears to be referred from google.TLD/ only?

[loopyal]

Our google referrals were up 30% the previous two weeks, went back to "normal" that week, dropped by 40% the next week, then doubled all through November and the first two weeks of December, then dropped slightly in the last half of December - it always does - and is now maybe 50% higher than in September. But the numbers are really too small to tell these days. (30 to 70 per day)

What did change over that time is imgres referrals increased by 200% and / referrals dropped by 80%

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

Your best bet would be to try and drill down into the data some more, and see if there's a specific segment of traffic within google.TLD. For example: location, new vs returning? Hard to tell unless you can find a more specific segment of traffic or provide more detail.

The only change I know of around this date, is when Google started encrypting keywords for logged in searches (not provided) but not too sure this would be related.

-Dan