Google News traffic spike mystery; referring URLs all blank, Omniture tags didn't fire.
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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.
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