Direct Traffic Spike
-
In February, I transferred an HTML site to a WordPress Platform. Since then, Direct traffic has spiked to nearly 400% since the WordPress transition. The Direct traffic spike took roughly 2 months before it started to kick in. Does anyone know what this could be attributed to?
-
The re-directs may have been the issue...will report back when I can see a trend. Thanks for the help!
-
Hi Steve
Direct traffic which 404's should not trigger any sort of hit. They could be coming from a variety of places: old links, bookmarks, browser history, emails, social shares etc. Your best bet if you want to retain any traffic value there is to 301 them to relevant pages if possible.
-Dan
-
That may have helped. We changed some of the page names to more relevant and descriptive pagenames. Alot of our landing pages are 404 when I look at the Direct Traffic now. Would that trigger a Direct Traffic hit somehow? Those should still be referrals from old links...right? Even then, the 404 direct hits don't make up for the difference. Direct traffic for the homepage is up significantly too.
-
In addition to some of the other suggestions, I would suggest segmenting your traffic even more. Is there any other common denominator? Mobile vs Desktop? Certain landing pages? Location? etc...
Also, it's not a typical looking glitch, which shoots straight up and stays there, the direct traffic takes some dips etc - what's happening there? Can you segment anything about the direct traffic during those dips etc?
-Dan
-
Is this consistent with scrapers and feed grabbers? I launched the site in mid february. The direct traffic didn't really kick in until a month or two after. The previous site was a straight .HTML site that I built. The new one is a WordPress site.
http://www.screencast.com/t/ETME6FbDhvz
I would like to think that the traffic is good. But if it is effecting the security or organic traffic in any way, I need to fix it. My organic traffic started to sink after the WordPress switch as well.
http://www.screencast.com/t/dJ0Oeyma5Xs
Any thoughts are appreciated.
-
Egol,
In my experience, scrapers and feedgrabbers are usually server-side scripts that won't register in Google Analytics because they won't have Javascript enabled.
Of course - the server logs will definitely show scrapers.
-
EGOL has a good point about the scrapers.
One thing I would like to mention about Wordpress is to pay attention to your spikes. Below is a link to my personal sites stats.
http://screencast.com/t/eJ6pFjg2BkFj
Now, I am going to show you the daily for july.
http://screencast.com/t/neiHXyj6ck
Now, here is the break down where you can see the most requested page.
http://screencast.com/t/pMT1tKpJOpO
Look how the numbers are skewed. I only change content on this site like 2 times a month. But the second most requested page is the admin page. I have noticed here lately that there are some new bots running and they are nailing the admin pages of WP.
With WP being the most used platform on the internet, it is like Windows when it comes to people looking for exploits to it. I would suggest using a Wordpress security plugin. I cannot really recommend any, I haven't used one myself. What I tend to do is just disable the login by renaming the file with an extension of .php_ then it will 404 all requests. This can be a viable option if you manage the sites totally and do not have clients that want to login to them, like in my case. If not I would look for a WP security plugin recommendation.
-
Scrapers and feedgrabbers.
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
-
Any solution to low search traffic on weekend
Hi. all, https://www.babyment.com is content website. our search traffic always shows a dip on weekend (friday to sunday), anyone has idea why it is like this? and is there a solution to this? or this is a just normal? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | melvinwu0 -
Direct Traffic from Ashburn, VA
We've seen a huge spike in traffic form Ashburn, VA every Monday. It's wrecking our analytics. I don't want to create a filter based on location because we should receive legitimate traffic from that location. I see there are a few other identifiers that make me think I could add a filter for just those items (iOS 5, Safari). Does anyone have a current best-practice for this type of problem? Tx!
Reporting & Analytics | | fishlizzer2 -
Google Analytics unexplainable traffic spike
Viewing this report **Behaviour > Site content > All pages **with primary dimensions of **Page ** and **Page title **are showing different results for one specific page on our site. We noticed a huge spike in pageviews and entrances to that specific page on our site. The user flow report shows traffic going through and from the page (in high volume) from other pages on the site which suggests that it's not the usual case of spam referrals. When I view the report above by page, I get unrealistic data. Over 600% increase in pageviews and over 900% increase in entrances. When I view by page title however, I get realistic results. Can anyone help shed some light on why these two reports will be different? Anyone else seeing similar issues?
Reporting & Analytics | | OptiBacUK0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
A switch from Search to Direct traffic from Feb 2012
I have read about the Google algorithm updates galore in 2012. I would therefore be inclined to suspect a sudden sharp drop in Search traffic this year to be caused by such updates. However, I am seeing what appears to be a direct switch from 'Search' to 'Direct' traffic as of about February 16th this year. There are no specific brand-building exercises or general advertising campaigns happening around this time for the site in question. It seems very UN-explainable? I wondered if there are any thoughts from the various lurking gurus? I have attached GA screenshot.. DjTu1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | MikiP0 -
How Can I Record .zip Traffic in Google Analytics
The company I am with shows traffic coming in to .zip files in Google Analytics. The traffic being recorded stopped a while back, but I know people are still downloading/visiting these .zip ULRs. I'm not sure how they were recording/tracking the .zip URLs (in Analytics) before, but I'd like to track them once again. Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | poolguy0 -
Whats the best way to separate Google Shopping from regular organic traffic in analytics?
whats the best way to separate Google Shopping from regular organic traffic in analytics?
Reporting & Analytics | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
Why does Google Analytics think PPC traffic is organic?
I have a bastard of a problem... Google Analytics is incorrectly tracking PPC traffic as SEO which is screwing up all my reporting . I don't care for rankings, I care for actual SEO traffic and I can't be sure that what i am seeing is correct which is driving me nuts. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | Red_Mud_Rookie1