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Dark Traffic & Long URLs - Clarification

Search Behavior

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LivDetrick Subscriber last edited by

Hi everyone,

I've been reading the 2017 report by Groupon and the 2017 article by Neil Patel r.e. dark traffic. Both of these articles work on the assumption that most long URLs are not direct traffic because people wouldn't type a long URL into their browser. However, what happens to me personally all the time is that I start typing a URL into the browser, and the browser brings up a list of pages I've visited recently, and I click on some super long URL that I didn't bookmark but have visited in the past. That is legitimate direct traffic, but it's a long URL. I'm just wondering if there's something flawed in my reasoning or in the reasoning of Patel and Groupon. Maybe most people aren't relying on browsers like I am, or maybe things have changed a lot in the past 3 years. What do you think? And are there any more recent resources/articles that you would recommend r.e. trying to parse out dark traffic?

https://neilpatel.com/blog/dark-traffic-stealing-data/

Thanks!
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