: Why Wikipedia doesn't appear as a referral in Google Analytics' Traffic sources? One of my clients has a website and got not spammy backlinks in a Wikipedia article. When I test it for SEO
One of my clients has a website and got not spammy backlinks in a Wikipedia article.
When I test it for SEO purposes with Google Analytics (from different IPs), apparently there is no referral information. On the Real-Time view my test visit is visible but with There is no data for this view in the referrals subview. And this visits appear as (direct) / (none) on the Traffic sources view.
Wikipedia is not hiding in any way its links origin, since it is shown in the server visits log. Is Google ignoring Wikipedia as a referral? Am I missing anything else?
Update: Now it works, several days after the link was active. Maybe something is detecting for how long the link was there so that it doesn't work just from the beginning, as a security measure? Many visits are actually not recorded.
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As of 2015 wikipedia uses https for all connections
To ensure that Wikipedia users can share in the world’s knowledge more securely, the Wikimedia Foundation is implementing HTTPS, to encrypt all traffic on Wikimedia sites.
blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/12/securing-wikimedia-sites-with-https/
Linking from secure connections to non-https sites will prevent the referrer from being transmitted.
A user agent MUST NOT send a Referer header field in an unsecured HTTP request if the referring page was received with a secure protocol. See Section 9.4 for additional security considerations.
tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-5.5.2
For future reference. If you are using Universal Google Analytics then you can use Channel Grouping to add a specific referrer to a specific channel. You can also add things to channels based on medium and etc. Very useful.
This setting is under Admin -> Channel Setting
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