{"id":39708,"date":"2016-03-02T18:03:41","date_gmt":"2016-03-03T02:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/?p=39708"},"modified":"2016-03-02T18:03:41","modified_gmt":"2016-03-03T02:03:41","slug":"dark-search-dark-social-smx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/dark-search-dark-social-smx\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Search, Dark Social & Everything In Between #SMX"},"content":{"rendered":"
There’s an invisible web. Just because it’s out there doesn’t mean the search engine can see it and attribute it correctly. The invisible web is a concept that was introduced in\u00a0Chris Sherman and Gary Price’s “The Invisible Web” in 2001.<\/p>\n
In 2013, search marketers saw a big spike in direct\u00a0referral traffic. Our speaker Marshall Simmonds\u00a0(@mdsimmonds<\/a>),\u00a0Founder and CEO, Define Media Group, Inc. explains what is causing dark search and social traffic, traffic with no referrer data in analytics.\u00a0Search marketers need to protect their budget by understanding it and explaining it to non-technical people.<\/p>\n Direct traffic is a URL that comes with no referral string. An analytics tool\u00a0puts all no-referrer string visits in a direct traffic bucket. This direct traffic can be segmented into\u00a0three buckets: search, mobile and social.<\/p>\n So what’s the problem with direct traffic in analytics? If you’re involved in a search or social campaign, you’re not getting all your credit because their are dark leaks in your traffic. The goal is to be able to expel that direct traffic that is affecting you negatively.<\/p>\n For this presentation, Simmonds looked at:<\/p>\n To extract signals. Even Google is a big source of obscured data, as you’ll recall with (Not Provided). Search Console is good, it’s one part of the picture. Another big offender is comScore and the search marketshare report, year after year published with no transparency other than “hey we get this from ISP data.”<\/p>\n Add to this fuzzy picture the BuzzFeed shenanigans. BuzzFeed is always saying that SEO is dead, but from SimilarWeb we can see that BuzzFeed gets a large portion of their traffic from search.<\/p>\n More misinformation from Google: Simmonds has seen zero ranking effect of moving a site to HTTPS. He notes that social share counts will reset if you move your site to secure, but there is a way to get it back for Facebook.<\/p>\n If you’re going secure, talk to tech about implementing the Meta Referrer tag. That will get you credit and keep you out of the dark social trap.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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Dark Search<\/h2>\n