21 votes
Accepted

What is the difference between "nofollow" and "noreferrer" link from SEO perspective?

The difference is that, in theory, rel="noreferrer" should not have any SEO impact, while nofollow clearly specifies that the link does not endorse in any way the target URL. nofollow was invented by ...
marcanuy's user avatar
  • 2,634
19 votes
Accepted

What is the difference between noopener and noreferrer?

rel="noopener" is used so that when a new window is created upon clicking a link, malicious javascript code running in the new window will not access your previous window via the window.opener ...
Prinny's user avatar
  • 1,378
11 votes
Accepted

What causes an empty referrer field in a webserver log file?

That means that the visitor did not send a referrer for the request. That can happen if: The user was a "direct" visitor and typed the URL into the browser bar or used a bookmark. The user followed ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

bizarre referrer in web access.log

This is just referer spam, from Wikipedia: Referrer spam (also known as log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making ...
MrWhite's user avatar
  • 42.6k
5 votes
Accepted

How does changing an HTTP referrer header help circumvent crawler blocking

The idea would be to make your requests look as much like a real browser as possible. Real browsers send referrer headers. You'd want to send referrer headers that look as much as possible like ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

Why is the http version of my website still receiving the most search traffic?

In most cases the URLs used in Google Search Results come from their search index, and therefore will be based on the canonical entries they have. e.g. it will be the https version of your website ...
Tony McCreath's user avatar
4 votes

External sites appearing in Google Analytics

It's just spam :) Scripts can send Pageview and Event data to random GA tracking codes without visiting your site. The best fix is to create a filter that only allows requests originating from your ...
Rob Flaherty's user avatar
4 votes

Prevent sending referrers when clicking links from my site with an exception for one domain

Method 2 Following the concept of method 1 (below), I realised this could probably be done with just one technology and without reloading the current page. It's all done client side with plain ...
Josh's user avatar
  • 221
3 votes

What is the difference between "nofollow" and "noreferrer" link from SEO perspective?

"nofollow" is used by Google, to specify that the Google search spider should not follow that link "Noreferrer": Specifies that the browser should not send a HTTP referrer header if the user follows ...
Software Engineer's user avatar
3 votes

Track 301 redirect traffic from domainA to domainB in Google analytics

Solution that matches your query exactly: https://web.archive.org/web/20161211202057/www.lanevance.com/web/web-development/tracking-301-redirects-with-google-analytics You can set up a campaign ...
abhinsit's user avatar
  • 1,714
3 votes
Accepted

Find external site which sends 404 URL to my website

Take a look at https://www.searchviu.com/en/spam-traffic-google-analytics/. This is a good article on setting up GTM with additional parameters so that the only hits that show up in Analytics are ...
Trebor's user avatar
  • 3,010
3 votes

Double redirect - referrer in headers

Is it possible to check on the end (3) that user visit came from (1) my shortened link? No, because "(1) my shortened link" is not the referrer. The web page that contains "(1) my ...
MrWhite's user avatar
  • 42.6k
2 votes

Referrals from googleads.g.doubleclick.net . I don't have adwords running

If you are not running any AdWords campaign But You may have Added the Google's "Matched Content Native Ads" on your website/blog. I guess you know about the matched content ads. When someone clicks ...
Ashish Gupta's user avatar
2 votes

How to get keywords from Google HTTP referrer?

This website decodes the url for you but there's not too much information in there. https://gqs-decoder.appspot.com/ scheme : http netloc : www.google.sk path : /url params : query : usg : ...
Luen's user avatar
  • 21
2 votes
Accepted

How do I keep track of UTM referrer during an account activation process?

I was thinking about something similar the other day. An easy way to keep track would be to send the users of the email campaign to a unique URL specifically designated for the email campaign so you'd ...
Andrew Smallwood's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

Social referrer info in google analytics

Sadly, there is no way to get detailed information about which Facebook or Twitter posts link to yours using Google Analytics. That is because neither Facebook or Twitter includes the information in ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

Unknown files appearing in my website 404 error page list without a referring URL

All of these files which are being checked for including the /\xef\xbf\xbd\xef\xbf\xbd\xef\xbf\xbd\xef\xbf\xbd which you mention in your last comment are attempts by attackers to identify common files ...
Chris Rutherfurd's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

According to Google Analytics 80% of my visitors are "direct", but I suspect that isn't true, what can I do?

I guess your website is not https and since most traffic comes from github.com, which has https, the referrer will not be set. You can read it on the RFC page A user agent MUST NOT send a Referer ...
Jurik's user avatar
  • 868
2 votes

How to track subdomains with Google Analytics while having mod_rewrite redirect to a subdomain?

The following example describes how to keep the referrer while switching from http to https. In your .htaccess: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1?...
Holtwick's user avatar
  • 121
2 votes

Why do HTTPS referrers from Google sometimes still contain keywords?

@user82217 noted that it could be faked. I suspect that it is. Google doesn't send traffic directly to your site when a link is clicked they send the user through some redirects (for tracking I ...
adam-asdf's user avatar
  • 2,077
2 votes

Why do HTTPS referrers from Google sometimes still contain keywords?

Check the User-Agent that correspond to these requests - is it an old browser? Google uses a referrer meta tag in the head section of the SERPs of the form: <meta content="origin" name="referrer"&...
MrWhite's user avatar
  • 42.6k
2 votes

URL inspection tool in Google Search Console shows "N/A" for sitemaps and a bizarre referring page

The "Referring Page" URL means that is where Googlebots got the first indication of your website, according to the last time it was indexed. See this Google Webmasters Community (Search ...
mark2090's user avatar
2 votes

Hotlink Protection compatible with Google AMP pages

Thanks guys. I've got it working by adding this rule RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?www-patchworkoftips-com.cdn.ampproject.org [NC].
UdegbunamChuks's user avatar
2 votes

HTTPS site to HTTPS site referral traffic not showing up in Google Analytics

It sounds like site B may have implemented a same-origin (or no-referrer) Referrer-Policy which affects the HTTP Referer header that browsers send with all outgoing links (in compliant browsers). ...
MrWhite's user avatar
  • 42.6k
2 votes
Accepted

Google Analytics: does "referral" apply too to sites in your same domain?

You need to update your domain exclusion list for your new Google Analytics Property. All newly created properties are created with including full your website domain into domain exclusion list ...
gintsg's user avatar
  • 546
2 votes

Drop in referral data due to HTTP, changed to HTTPS no recovery referral data since (in the last year)

I just tested whether or not implementing HSTS and getting your site on the preload list would allow browsers to pass a referrer through a http link to your site. Sadly it doesn't work. Here is how ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

How to filter a spam site from Google Analytics referral traffic

You are filtering on the wrong thing. You have the filter field set to Hostname. That will filter Google Analytics hits that claim to be recording statistics for that site. If you filter on the ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
1 vote
Accepted

Exceptional spike in traffic: can Google Analytics help to know the reason?

Google Analytics hides the ability to compare various metrics on one graph under the feature it calls "motion charts". You access motion charts using the three dot icon on the top right of the graph....
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
1 vote

Find which Youtube video is a referral in Google Analytics

Try to add to your source/medium report a second dimension "Ad Content" - what do you see? If this will not help, so there should be accesses from YT homepage, as Stephen Ostermiller pointed out in ...
Evgeniy's user avatar
  • 10k

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