Why Wikipedia doesn't appear as a referral in Google Analytics' Traffic sources?
- by Rober
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 beggining, as a security measure? Many visits are actually not recorded.