Google Analytics, Referrals -- What do they indicate?

1. 71

   Ivorwenposted 8 years ago

   Trying to better understand backlinks, key words and such, I have been studying my Analytics report. 
   
   I noticed quite a few referrals from different sites, that I have never heard of before.  These sites did not show up when I checked backlinks, earlier this week.  Being snoopy, I checked some of them out.  Most are forums and blogs.  Does this mean that someone has linked to my work, but that the links are no-follow, or what?
   
   Thank you in advance.

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2. 47

   johnr54posted 8 years ago

   As I understand your comment, you don't see the links coming from the places that some of your referral traffic is coming from.
   
   First, if you are checking the links on Google, they don't ever list all the links they find. Yahoo gives a much more complete picture, and is preferred for checking links.
   
   Links not showing up can be for a number of reasons.  Referrals can start the moment someone posts a link to your hub, but it will take much longer for the search engines, specifically Yahoo to find them.  It's not uncommon for them to take a month to find a link.  Yahoo will report nofollowed links, even if they aren't weighting them in their rankings.
   
   Furthermore, if you are seeing traffic from forums, many times these are members only access, and the search engines aren't allowed to crawl them ever, so those will not ever show up in any backlink report.

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3. 71

   Ivorwenposted 8 years ago

   Thank you John.  I did not realize it could take so long for links to be found, and the stats I am checking are from the last month.

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4. 71

   thisisoliposted 8 years ago

   Hi Ivor,
   
   The links to your site may not show up on google backlinks search for several reasons, some of these are
   
   No-Follow - These are links which are tagged with the No Follow attribute, this stops google search from indexing them.  people can still click the link to your Hub though.
   
   Time - Google links can take up to a month to index backlinks, though it usually only takes a few days.
   
   Private - Some sites are more private than others, it could be a password protected forum, or a website which prevents Google indexing entirely.
   
   Removal or movement - The link could have been removed, or been on a blog post which was archived.
   
   Hope this helps!
   
   Analytics can provide hours of entertainment, but don't let it interrupt your writing!

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5. 71

   Ivorwenposted 8 years ago

   Thanks so much Thisisoli. 
   
   I am just trying to understand it all. 
   
   And you are right, writing is more important than where the clicks are coming from.

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