Why would on-site search queries show up as referral traffic?
-
The site analytics have been set up for over a year and suddenly last month there was a huge spike in referral traffic (1100+ sessions). Upon further investigation, the majority of it was coming directly from internally, either as mysite.com or search.mysite.com and the landing pages from the referrals are all /search.html?query=*
This was never an issue before so I'm trying to understand what could have changed. I'm following up with the client to find out if their dev team may have changed anything related to their search engine but I'm wondering if there may be another explanation.
A few notes: previously mysite.com / search.mysite.com were not in the Referral Exclusion list. I've added them now but this was never an issue before.
Thanks in advance!
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
-
Filters for referral bots ineffective
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here. I've been trying to block spam from my client's analytics for over a month and I just can't seem to get it right. I am beyond frustrated. Here is a list of the filters I have: http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#0 And here is referral traffic from them regardless: http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#1 Specifically this is what the filter looks like. Am I doing something wrong here? http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#2 I have also put a filter in place to block traffic from Russia, and it doesn't seem to be working 100% either. http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#3 On top of that, it seems anytime I do manage to block something, another site just pops up in its place. Is it endless? My clients are very small local business and this is absolutely ruining their analytics. I can't even show them their traffic reports since it's absolutely meaningless with all this spam. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | everestagency0 -
Linked my adwords account to GA and vice versa and still paid search is getting recorded into organic traffic??
Hi Mozzers, I have linked properly my adwords account to GA and vice versa and somehow I can see 3/4 of this paid traffic recorded to organic search. The most confusing part is that I can see 1/4 of the paid traffic under the "paid" metric. At this point I don't know really what should I do? Thank you guys in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Analytics not tracking traffic from Old Domain Redirect
We've recently 301 redirected one of our client's domains to their new website and the strange thing is, we aren't seeing an increase in traffic in analytics. You would expect the traffic to increase roughly by the traffic volume from the old domain. There were a few hundred redirects and we tested a large sample and the redirects have been implemented properly. Is there something that we did incorrectly in our implementation of the domain redirect? Or is there something else that we need to do in Analytics to properly track those redirects?
Reporting & Analytics | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Does anyone know what's happened to google analytics -> traffic sources -> SEO -> queries many of my accounts are showing a drop to zero in the laste few days
Howdy mozzers It's in the question title really. Zero impressions showing for the last few days on. Multiple accounts Any thought out there
Reporting & Analytics | | Big_Partnership0 -
No (Not Provided) Traffic
Hi All, I have a site that gets around 500,000 visits every month from the UK and US, but funny enough the number number of visits under (not provided) traffic is only 179 per month. For most websites I usually get 10% or 15% of the traffic under not provided, what could the reasons be for such a low percentage of (not provided)? Thanks, Carlos
Reporting & Analytics | | Carlos-R0 -
Traffic Down for Most Referrers - not just Google
Our traffic has taken a severe hit, over the past 3 weeks - down about 60%, which I had assumed was caused by the Penguin update. However on closer inspection of our analytics, our traffic is is down by between 30 and 50% for nearly all our referrers - including Bing and other search engines, referring sites, and even direct traffic! Google provides the vast majority of our traffic, so in terms of the absolute visitor count, the drop in Google traffic has the biggest effect - by some distance. But the fact that traffic is down by similar percentages suggest that Penguin isn't the cause of our troubles at all. We sell garden products in the UK, and it's just coming into peak season. Last year, May was one of our top months, External conditions - such as the very wet weather over the past month, economic gloom and doom - don't begin to explain this sudden and dramatic drop in traffic. We are very perplexed. If anyone has any bright ideas, I'd be interested to hear them. Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | atticus70 -
Internal site referrers
Hi, So I have a segment of my website-let’s call it /examplea, I am trying to figure out how many visits I have to /examplea from all other areas of my website i.e. /exampleb, /examplec etc to /examplea so almost internal site refers to a particular segment of my website, Any thoughts on how to do this within Google analytics ? Marc
Reporting & Analytics | | NRMA0 -
Google Analytics internal Site Search - Destination pages dispaly Search results
Hi, Im having a bit of an issue with Google Analytics internal site search, I am able to currently track the search terms through my website internal search but when I click onto destination pages I just get the search result page. When clicking destination pages I would expect to get the pages on which the user ended up after the results page, instead I just get the results page which is pretty much useless ?submitsearchXXXXXX hope you can help, look forward to your response. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Tug-Agency1