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Scenario: user goes to Google and performs a search - one of my old pages shows in the results (a page I have just created a 301 quick redirect for using an app within WordPress) - they click on my result and are redirected to the new page.
Question: will this user show-up in Google Analytics as a direct visitor? If not, how would they show as far as their traffic source?
Server-side 301 redirects should retain the referrer, as captured via the JavaScript document.referrer, so the traffic source in this case should be "google.com" (the search engine).
This is covered under the Redirects and Self-referrals section here, including an example diagram of a redirect.
For a more detailed discussion on this, with some exceptions to the above (such as right-clicking on the link instead and selecting something like "Open link in new tab"), view the Google Analytics thread here.
