60% of Direct traffic is actually Organic
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For some pre-reading, Groupon experimented with deindexing part of their site back in 2014 and found that they had a big drop in direct traffic: http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415
Recently I've conducted a similar test on a very large site and have found that Direct dropped somewhere between 50-80% for the pages deindexed, depending on the day (It has been running for ~4 days).
Has anyone else tried this experiment before? If so what were your results?
What I'm most interested in now is to find out why this traffic is classed as Direct - there appears to be no reason why the site or server would interfere, so I can only imagine that Google is sending traffic without referrer data. Does anyone have any thoughts as to why they would do that? -
I can't say that I have, but maybe you would like to write a Youmoz post about your research
I think it would get a good deal of attention!
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