GA and 301 redirect

301 redirected page still gets hits

[anylund]

Hi,

first time poster, long time reader ;)

I have three domains:
a.com
b.org
c.com

I have redirected with 301 permanent redirect b.org and c.com to a.com.
Redirections are in httpd.conf file.

For some reason I can see the b.org and c.com in Google Analytics as referring sites. I am baffled... how the tracking code gets executed on these sites that do not exist.

Thanks for replies

[BradleyT]

If you were to get a link from webmaster world, wouldn't it show up as a referring site even though they aren't running your tracking code?

It's simply telling you where the visitor came from.

[cgrantski]

Yeah, you are just getting confused about what the referrer report contains.

It's unfortunate that permanent server-side redirects tend to lose the original referrer info (the referrers to the redirecting domain). It's another reason for not having multiple domain names. You could capture the real referrer info if you switched to an ordinary redirect (tagged) but the search engines tend to penalize that.