Dark Traffic & Long URLs - Clarification
-
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!
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
-
Blog Post SEO - Bounce Rate & Layout
Mozzers, I wrote the following blog post about Microsoft’s current offer to receive $100 free in bing ads. http://www.cildermansolutions.com/blog/free-bing-ads-coupon-for-2017-get-100-in-free-advertising-credits I noticed that the bounce rate on the post is higher than i was expecting; I am wondering if this is because I put the eligibility rules for collecting the ads coupon in the 2nd paragraph...and people are just seeing that right away and bouncing. I obviously don’t want to lie or trick readers, but i am wondering if the community has any idea/suggestions. Thanks, Matt
Search Behavior | | matt.nails0 -
Direct 100+ URLs to our sister site?
Hi, We have two websites www.eurekasolutions.co.uk and www.eurekaaddons.co.uk - currently the eurekasolutions site has eureka addon products on it - we are thinking of re-directing these to www.eurekaaddons.co.uk instead (there are 100+ pages which are being ranked and picked up by google) Would it be foolish to re-direct these from eurekasolutions straight to eurekaaddons after them being on eurekasolutions for many many years? if so what is the best way to go about it and would this have a direct negative effect on our SEO? Both sites are serving for similar terms. Thanks,
Search Behavior | | EurekaSolutions0 -
My site traffic decreasing day by day
unfortunately its very bad for us . after panda update not affected any more but recent time . anybody can help us to fix the issue blog http://gurujobalert.com/ please thanks in advance
Search Behavior | | jenindras10 -
Strange traffic.
We are a norwegian bakeshop (sykkelkompaniet.no) and we have started getting a lot of direct traffic from Miami and Chico. Wondering why, and suspect that someone is trying to hack our system. Any suggestions? We have never been in Chico or in Miami... and we don't spend anything on marketing so far, furthermore we don't ship to the US. The traffic is about 800 unique hits a day.
Search Behavior | | sykkelkompaniet0 -
Surge in Yahoo! organic traffic?
Recently a domain I manage shot up in rankings for many industry related keywords in Yahoo! It only lasted for two days, but durring that time we saw about 300% increase in organic traffic. Durring that time we were spending a lot of money in paid ads. Can anyone explain the sudden surge in Yahoo! organic traffic and rankings? Could there have been traffic from our paid ads that tracked to organic search? We use Google analytics and an in-house tracking system that both showed the same trends.
Search Behavior | | SEOBodybuilder0 -
Dating Blog Posts & How Fast Google Picks up on New Pages
I had until a few months ago included the original post date of a new blog post on the site. I then removed it and none of my results in Google now include the blog post date, although for some (for articles written about events) Google includes the date of the event where you would usually see the post date. Since I did this, it seems like new blog posts are taking longer to rank on Google, some results are ranking well, and others declined relative to what I would have previously expected. What's the best thing to be doing? To include a date (considering a lot of my content is not time-relevant) or to keep it as it is now? The second thing, is I often go through and update my articles with new information and re-post it in my rss feed etc - ie the date becomes new again. How does Google treat this? Any ideas or comments would be great! Thanks
Search Behavior | | ben10001 -
Trailing slash at end of URLs?
Hi, I'm just about to put up a new site and I need to decide between having no trailing slash at the end of the all the URLs, or putting one in there. I think Matt Cutts has a slight preference for them, as stated here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more "Matt says he would slightly advocate for using a trailing slash simply because it clearly indicates that a URL is a folder and not a document." However, I'm really wondering. I mean, if people link to my site, they'll tend not to insert a trailing slash, I'm thinking... Your thoughts would be welcome on this one! Cheers, Luke
Search Behavior | | McTaggart0 -
What is Responsible for All My "Direct" Traffic?
We have a broad content site - the majority of our traffic overall comes in via deep links.Google analytics consistently shows 17-20% of daily traffic under the "direct" bucket, with the rest of the traffic about equally split between Referring sites and Organic search.However, if we look at the specific content in the "direct" bucket, the URLs that are being hit do tend to mirror rather closely the Search traffic. The close mapping to our Search traffic doesn't seem to make much sense - while some of it is probably bookmarks, it seems doubtful that that could be responsible for more than, say, 20% of this direct traffici based on the # of pages and types of pages (many of the pages that do well in search are honestly not ones that someone would be likely to bookmark). The traffic reported by google as "direct" for a given day tracks a lot closer to Search than Referral URLs (which tend to be he more viral content on our site). Any idea what could be causing this traffic to show as Direct? Do people tend to bookmark pages while doing searches to come back to them or something? THANKS everyone for the responses. Still not quite sure what it is, continuing to look into it, particularly technical issues that the link to the Avinash post might prove very helpful for
Search Behavior | | BG19850