We moved our website from HTTP to HTTPS. But we are still missing Google Analytics Referrals data from some HTTPS referrals sites.
Could it be because:
- Referrals sites still point to our HTTP web pages? (hence HTTPS -> HTTP (301 redirection) -> HTTPS looses the referral data)
- Some referrals sites have links with
nofollow noreferrerlike<a href="https://ourdomain" rel="nofollow noreferrer">. Oddly enough from our history data it looks likenoreferrerdidn't have any influence even just a few months ago like in April 2017. - some other reasons?
The default value of the meta referrer tag is
no-referrer-when-downgrade. This means you lose the referrer information on your existing http links from most https sites.301 Redirect
When you 301 redirect from an http request to the https version on your website, the referrer information has already been lost during the http request. There is no way to recover it later in the redirect chain.
The solution is to update the links to https. Unfortunately, this can be a big challenge when they're on websites all across the web.
Meta Referrer Tag
Websites can also use the meta referrer tag to override the default value. It is possible to configure this so that the referrer information is not passed along, even on an https to https request.
Google does this by using the
originvalue for the meta referrer tag and consequently, you know a visitor came from Google, but not what query they used to find your site.noreferrer
Setting
rel="noreferrer"informs browsers that support this attribute not to pass on referrer information for that specific link. However, older browsers don't support this and will still pass on referrer information.nofollow
This does not affect the referrer information.
It is used to communicate to search engines that the website does not vouch for the link. Most search engines use this information to ignore the link when calculating the link targets ranking. Some search engines also interpret the tag literally and choose not to follow the link at all, while others follow the link sometimes, and still others follow the link as they would a normal link.