How are 301s reported in GA?

[NextGenEDU]

Does anyone have any insight on exactly how on-site 301s are reported in Google Analytics?  My direct traffic seems to climb at the same rate as my organic with absolutely no off-line promotion.  I have a suspicion that the 301s that I have built to re-coupe traffic being sent to old pages are being reported as direct.  Any validity to this?

[mikecp]

Lou, I agree that it is odd that your'e seeing simultaneous upticks in traffic from the different mediums, but I wouldn't say it's out of the realm of natural possibility. As for your original question, I think you've mostly figured it all out. But allow me to do my best to clarify: The GA snippet would never actually fire on the old URL in the case of an old URL 301 redirecting to a new URL. 301s DO preserve referral information. So an old link on example.com that links to your OLD url will track in GA as landing on the new URL with example.com as a referrer. There are a few instances where the referral information will be lost, most (all) of them are detailed in the previously linked thread here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google Analytics/thread?tid=51c7a2aa222f415e&hl=en Mike

[NextGenEDU]

No PPC or email, I have been pushing straight organic with a lot of 301 work.

Just real weird to see a jump like this in direct traffic that mimics the referral and organic trends.

Thanks again for the feedback.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I agree with you that the answer is quite generic. Altho Google is able to know where the traffic is referred from. Via HTTP Headers you could already easily find out where a page will refer to, like I did with this case when using a 301 redirect. While Google isn't probably using this option it is possible as you see.

I especially like your reference, because a couple of months later the guy who replied invented the wheel again and is implying in this article the opposite in my opinion.

To get some more information about your question, did you sent out recently some email campaigns or started up some SEA/ PPC campaigns?

[NextGenEDU]

Thanks for the reply.  I get what you are saying, but there is something that just isn't quite right about the answer in the article.  A 301 happens on the server side, so google wouldn't know about it.  Additionally, no page (let alone tracking code) exists for the old urls that now have redirects.  I would think that in order to qualify it as a referrer, google would have to know where the traffic was referred from ... no?  I think I would feel better if the article you referenced actually stated 301 instead of a redirect (possibly client-side) that COULD be tracked by google.

Here is something I found where there are conflicting answers to the same question I have here, maybe some others here on SEOMoz can weigh in on this as well.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Lou,

I can't make this answer any longer: Your answer could be found within this help article of Google Analytics. To make this a bit more efficient: "If your site uses redirects, the redirecting page becomes the landing page's referrer."

So according to this, this is not causing the increase of your direct traffic.

Hope this helps!