.com site referral traffic to ccTLDs
-
We have 7 international domains set up along with our main .com site. All of the ccTLds are showing their main referral traffic as coming from the .com site in GA, and most of those being from mobile. Each site is set up correctly with geo-targeting and hreflang tags. Has anyone experienced this before?
-
Hi there Jarred,
The first thing I would do is set up Google Search Console accounts for each of the ccTLDs you have to see if Google is sending all traffic to your .com or if this is just a Google Analytics tracking problem.
The second thing I would do is crawl the international sites with Screaming Frog. It's possible that you copied over the pages between ccTLDs and kept internal links to the .com version on other ccTLD sites.
Last, I'd check which pages are typically the referral source in GA. Then we can troubleshoot from there.
Hope this helps! I realize we've taken a bit to get back to you, so let us know if you fixed the problem on your own in the mean time. We're interested to hear how it worked out.
Thanks!
Kristina
-
Are you using a unique GA Tracking ID per domain - It's the UA- number?
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
-
Two long established sites with similar audiences, what do we do?
Hi guys, We operate two long established and reasonably well ranking sites — our company website which was built on a keyword domain: market-stalls.co.uk (approx 15 years online) and our online store which was established several years later on a different domain: tradersupplies.co.uk (approx 9 years online). (At the bottom of this post I've attached real world traffic and turnover figures that demonstrate the issue we're facing) The problem is... The above sites target very similar audiences and keywords and both rank fairly well but I know are likely competing against eachother We're a small company (8-10 employees) and we (or rather, I) don't have the time or resources to blog, build back links, manage opseo and all the social channels etc for both sites. I'm struggling to cope with one. The question is... Do we abandon the original company site (market-stalls.co.uk) in favour of pooling all our resource in to improving rankings for our online store (tradersupplies.co.uk). All our social media presence relates to tradersupplies.co.uk. We don't have any social channels for market-stalls.co.uk. Ironically, the only blog we have is established on market-stalls.co.uk — set up a couple of years ago in the hope to pull ourselves back up the rankings — but it hasn't been updated in over a year due to time restraints. Or do we attempt to keep both sites operational, despite a lack of resource? That would likely include a fairly sizeable overhaul of market-stalls.co.uk to bring it up to date with modern design standards, establishing social media channels for market-stalls.co.uk, creating a blog on tradersupplies.co.uk, and regularly updating two blogs and two sets of social media channels with unique content. Sounds like a pretty huge job right!? Obviously, had we been setting up our business in 2017 and having read the many community posts on the subject of multiple websites, we wouldn't be splitting our time between two websites and would be focussing solely on building one highly ranking site. But unfortunately we're not in this position and we're in a quandary because we don't know whether or not we should let our original, highly ranking company site drop off the radar in favour of focussing on building traffic to our online store. This situation arose out of a decision to establish our online store on a different domain to our company website. Back in 2007 I rebuilt market-stalls.co.uk and spent a lot of time optimising it. The site blew up and we were ranking very well for all kinds of keywords related to market stalls In 2009 we opened our online store tradersupplies.co.uk which sells all of the products advertised on market-stalls.co.uk and then some By using "buy now" buttons on market-stalls.co.uk which redirected to tradersupplies.co.uk, our original site was driving a large amount of traffic and sales to tradersupplies.co.uk. At it's peak it was driving almost £6,000 GBP a month in sales. This has since dropped to around a third/quarter of this total. As the business grew we began to run short of time to maintain market-stalls.co.uk and it has inevitably slipped down the rankings This has also had a direct impact on the referral traffic and resulting sales on tradersupplies.co.uk. I've attached below the analytics which show the drop in referral traffic to tradersupplies.co.uk and the drop off in sales. I have a feeling I know the answer to this debacle but I'm keen to hear the opinions of those that may have found themselves in this position before! UPDATE: I've just had a call with our Magento developer halfway through writing this post ... he has suggested we transfer all content from market-stalls.co.uk over to CMS pages on our Magento powered online store, and create 301 redirects. Apparently this will carry the weight of market-stalls.co.uk over to tradersupplies.co.uk. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? turnover.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | tinselworm0 -
Alternative tools for Keyword Traffic
Hi There, Wondering if anyone has any other tools they would recommend using for finding out keyword traffic on websites. Currently (and I'm sure like most), my website is connected to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. My biggest frustration becomes the "(not set)" variable that appears when I go to review the keywords section. It's always such a large number and I have no way of finding out what people might be typing in and coming across my website. Of course, I understand the privacy factor as to why Google must do this but it's certainly difficult to analyze what's working and what's not. Any tips, tricks or suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks, Lindsay
Reporting & Analytics | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Why doesn't Google seem to care about referral spam?
In researching the issue of referral spam, there is no shortage if info, both on MOZ and beyond. But, neither the Google Analytics Blog or Help Forums seem to mention the issue at all. I'd think it is something that they would want to get rid of, yet it seems like they don't even acknowledge that it exists. Anyone have insights into this? Am I missing something, or is Google strangely silent on an issue that is becoming more and more annoying for anyone trying to use GA data?
Reporting & Analytics | | irapasternack1 -
Deleted Rarely Visited Pages - Traffic Dropped (Big Time)
Hi folks: I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on a problem I am having with organic traffic. One of our sites has about 500 pages/blog posts. We had about 200 pages that no one was visiting, or only one to ten people had visited in an entire year. As a result, we decided to experiment, and delete any page which had fewer than 5 visits in a year. This resulted in a deletion of about 90 pages.We did this on April 6 or 7 of this year. Two days later, we had a substantial drop in visits to the site. We had been getting about 300 sessions a day. Now, we are lucky to get that in a month. I know there was an algorithm update in late March, but our traffic dropped about two weeks after that, and a day or so after the deletion of the pages. There is a clear demarcation on analytics. I gave it a month, the traffic did not recover, so we decided to restore the pages. Traffic has not recovered and it has been about 3 months now. Does anyone have any thoughts on why we might have experienced such a drastic drop as well as what we might do to recover from it? Thanks very much
Reporting & Analytics | | jnfere0 -
Site Crash Effect On Traffic
All, I manage a site that unfortunately crashed due to a server issue in late October for about 3 hours. Prior to the crash, traffic was the best it had ever been in the 3+ year history of the site. As you might expect, since the crash traffic has gone gradually down and is now about 15% off pre-crash numbers. I understand that when a site crashes, it disrupts the crawling process and can disrupt traffic (in my case rich snippets were thrown off for days) but would love to hear experiences any of you have had in similar situations. How much did traffic drop after a crash? When did it recover? Other thoughts? Thanks, John
Reporting & Analytics | | JSOC0 -
Why would a website rank lower than weaker site?
Hi, Today I noticed that my website is ranking one place lower than a competitor in Google UK ,despite my site having a stronger domain authority and page authority. Is there a plausible reason for this, i'm slightly confused? Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Benjamin3790 -
Google Maps not passing referral data
Google Maps is not passing referral data (URLs, not KWs). Google+ Local is referring, but nothing from maps. Maps referrals appear to be coming across as direct. Any ideas? We haven't found anything online, one of the guys at the office documented what we did find, using Chrome's debugger - http://manofactionmetrics.com/2012/11/02/google-maps-not-passing-any-referral-data/
Reporting & Analytics | | Danieljacobree0 -
Direct traffic
Our web site is thefutonshop.com. we have seen a spike then a drop off in direct traffic and dont know how to figure out why in analyitics. Ithe drop off is all on our index page.
Reporting & Analytics | | FUTONSHOP0