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
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
-
Specific Industry Website Conversion Rates: Lighting
Hi All, There's loads of info around on general retail conversion rates, but does anyone have any experience with online lighting shops and typical conversion rates? This is a highly price driven shopper, and from my experience so far they bounce around looking for the best price... We've recently taken ownership of this new site, and I'm not sure I can relate general metrics to this site... although there is lots of work to do on here! Cheers in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | b4cab0 -
Referral Exclusion List - Data Questsion
This may seem like a silly question. Since we are having an issue with self-referrals, we checked all the pages and everything is tagged properly, I used the referral exclusion list to exclude our domains. Question is, since we had a large number of our revenue coming in from the self-referring traffic, what happens to that revenue data once I add our domains to the referral exclusion list?
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
Is there an automated way to determine which pages of your website are getting 0 traffic?
I'm doing a content audit on my company website and want to identify pages with zero traffic. I can use GA for low traffic, but not zero traffic. I can do this manually, but it would take a long time. Are there any tools to help me determine these pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | Ksink0 -
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 -
Google referral drop after setting preferred domain
Hey all, After doing a lot of research, and verifying here in the forum, I set our site's preferred domain on monday. We had no preferred domain set for years, but we were already redirecting the non www site to the www one. So, it was evidently an oversight. The day after I set the preferred domain (Jan 29) our google referral traffic hit an all time low. Any other thoughts on the cause? Any ideas on why setting a preferred domain would be a bad idea? Our site is www.mnn.com. Thanks!! Lisa
Reporting & Analytics | | Aggie0 -
How can i see queries what my visitors are searching for, in my website?
Google analytics installed, but they are not showing. What additional things should i add there? I need to see most popular search queries and add more content to these pages for panda.
Reporting & Analytics | | bele0 -
Increase number of pages crawled
Only one page is being crawled, how do I increase the number to include most of our site?
Reporting & Analytics | | NorthCoast0 -
Increase in 'Googlebot-Image' visits in analytics
Hi, I noticed a substantial increase in 'Googlebot-Image' visits data under Technology>Browser & OS in Google analytics for a few clients. Is this a bug? Are there any known fixes apart from just adding a filter to exclude the data? Regards Niladri
Reporting & Analytics | | neildomain0