Google News traffic spike mystery; referring URLs all blank, Omniture tags didn't fire.
-
Our content is occasionally featured in Google News. We recently have had two episodes where this happened, but (a) nearly all the referring URLs were blank, and (b) our backend logs show 3-4x more requests for the article in question than Omniture does.
In other words, hundreds of thousands of visitors requested a URL from our site (as proven by the traffic logs), but don't seem to have come from Google News (because HTTP_REFERER was blank), and didn't execute the onpage javascript tag to notify Omniture of the pageview.
Perhaps this has nothing to do with Google News, but it is too strong a coincidence that the two times we were on there recently, the same thing happened: big backend traffic spike that is not seen by Omniture.
It is as if Google News causes browsers to pre-fetch our article without executing the javascript on the page. And without sending a referring URL.
Has anyone else seen anything like this before?
Stats from the recent episode:
- 835,000 HTTP requests for the article URL (logged by our servers)- these requests came from 280,000 distinct IP addresses (70% US)
- the #1 referring URL is blank. This accounts for 99.4% of requests. Which, in itself, is hard to believe. These people had to come from somewhere. I believe browsers don't pass HTTP_REFERER when you click from an SSL page to a non-SSL page, but I think Google News doesn't bounce users to SSL by default.That said, we do see other content pages with 70-90% blank referring URLs. Rarely 99+% though.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
A huge spike in traffic, mainely from social and organic
Hi there, We see this huge spike in traffic to our home page for almost a week now. When I check the source I see a crazy spike in Facebook traffic (25,630% change!!), Twitter and organic. The spike in traffic is to our home page alone. The bounce rate is much higher than avg. and time on page is shorter. Also, no. of new visitors to the site is higher than average. The traffic is obviously low quality and is hurting our site's statistics. Any ideas as to why this is happening? Many thanks in advance, Gal
Reporting & Analytics | | tomedess0 -
Why my WMT is showing more clicks than my Google Analytics Organic Search Traffic?
Hello Everybody, Can somebody help me figure out this puzzle: My WMT is showing 6000 clicks, while my Organic Traffic in Google Analytics is showing only 3500 daily ... how is that possible? Best Regards
Reporting & Analytics | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
More Traffic From Lower Rankings?
I have access to analytics for two different sites that rank for the same keyword. Strangely, the site that ranks on page 3 gets three times as much traffic as the site that ranks on page 1 (rankings according to multiple SEO tools as well as my own browser). How is this possible?
Reporting & Analytics | | JABacchetta0 -
Are Panda/Penguin Penalties not Global but only fired for specific Google CCTLDs?
An international portfolio of web sites has been suffering from Panda and Penguin over the last months. Essentially many of the international sites completely disappeared from the top 50 when before we had many Top 5 positions for competitive key words. Today we noticed that it appears that for all this time rankings for local keywords have not been affected for domains outside of the most relevant Google CCTLD for the page. To give an example: Domain.it / Keyword 1 (IT) = Italian Competitive Keyword Google.it: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 4
Reporting & Analytics | | sp80
Google.it: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position --- Google.com: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 1
Google.com: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position 1 Google.de: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 3
Google.de: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position 4 Have other people observed such behavior? Does this give any pointers towards how the recovery strategies should be drafted? We have experienced that the more search volume a keywords has received the harder the Panda/Penguin impact. So one hypothesis could be that because the international Google domains do not receive overly significant traffic for the localized keywords Panda/Penguin protection algorithms are not being applied with the same force. Any thoughts are welcome. /Thomas1 -
Alternative to Google Analytics
Hi from sunny Manchester! I'm looking for recommendations for alternatives to GA. I'm specifically looking for something which won't sample data and will give us accurate numbers. Our site is pretty big, it receives 6 million+ visits and 50 million+ pageviews/year. Any recommendations would be greatly received together with any good/bad experiences you've had with them. Thanks in advance, Brendan.
Reporting & Analytics | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
Google analtyics code placement
I saw that Google suggests the analytics code be in the , will this effect the page load if it is in here? Also, is it a problem to have it in the body?
Reporting & Analytics | | Gordian0 -
Organic search on google
Hi there, pl take a look at this link, there is a section which says shared results and has a star against two agencies and once article. can pl someone let me know what those starts are and how to get them? Thank you 🙂 so sorry - the link is http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=digital+mareketing+agency+los+angeles Vijay
Reporting & Analytics | | vijayvasu0