Dramatic Increase in referrals from own website

[LeslieVS]

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

[LeslieVS]

Thanks so much for the clarity. This place is awesome! Getting with my developer to work out this issue.

[LeslieVS]

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

[mikecp]

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.

[KTaylor]

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.

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[LeslieVS]

www.longboatkeyclub.com

The self referral is coming from "longboatkeyclub.com" exactly.

[KTaylor]

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.

[LeslieVS]

I apologize for typo! racking