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Sorry if this has been answered but I can't seem to get a straight answer to my questions by searching around. How is traffic referred by Google Images counted in Google Analytics? I know it used to be referral traffic from google.com/imgres. A lot of things I have read say that it should all be under google/organic now, but my site still gets referral traffic from google.com/imgres, so that can't be. However I also get traffic as google/organic that I am pretty sure is from image search, because we don't rank for the keyword normally, but we do for image search. What's the deal? How is traffic from an embedded image in a regular result page counted? How can I segment my image search traffic better? It would be great to see image search traffic as it's own medium. I found a script here -- http://jrom.net/google-images-in-google-analytics -- that looks promising, has anyone used it or can recommend another way? I haven't used the GA API very much so I want to make sure the script is kosher and won't screw up my numbers.

Two and half a weeks ago, my site was slapped with a penalty -- 60% of organic traffic disappeared over 2-3 days. After investigating we discovered that our site was serving the same content for all subdomains, and Google somehow had two additional subdomains it was crawling and indexing. We solved the issue with 301 redirects to our main site (www) a couple of days after the drop -- about two weeks ago. Our rankings have not recovered, and the subdomains are still indexed per Webmaster Tools. Yesterday we submitted a Reconsideration Request. Will that help? Is there any other way to speed up the process of lifting the penalty? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Thank you!

Hi all, We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower. One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www). Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August. We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor: We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks. Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day. GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact. Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day. Thanks!