referrers not being recorded

  • Unknown's avatar
    moustacheiam · Member ·

    Hi, for a long time now, like 80 percent of all traffic to my site has not had referrers tracked, commonly the first page they land on is my home page, in almost all cases. could I be right in thinking that these are not recorded as the user is either directly coming to my blog by inserting the link to the search bar? I am just a little confused as they seem to be coming from all over the world. I think it is a combination of the visitor typing in the address search bar and using a vpn as most of the people i know do not live in the countries from where this is happening

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    You are correct that someone who lands on your site by typing the URL directly into their browser, there won’t be any referrer stat generated.

    But even if someone clicks on a link on another site, or even a Google search result, there’s no guarantee that a referrer will be recorded:

    1) If the site where they clicked the link doesn’t send referrer headers along with their traffic, there won’t be a referrer recorded.

    2) The visitor might be using a browser add-on like Privacy Badger or Ghostery that actively block referrer headers, preventing us from recording the referrer.

    3) Some browsers, like Opera, and search engines, like DuckDuckGo, also block referrer headers by default, preventing us from recording those.

    So people could be finding your site via search results, or via links you or other people shared, and getting to it that way. But we don’t always have a way to tell.

    Blocking referrer headers in some way or other is becoming more common as people become more aware of online privacy, so that particular stat is not as useful as it used to be, and you shouldn’t look for any correlation between that and the actual views recorded on your site.

    Let me know if you have more questions about this.

  • The topic ‘referrers not being recorded’ is closed to new replies.