If I put a rel="nofollow" will the referrer site will appear on Google Analytics of example.com?

Question

If I put a rel="nofollow" will the referrer site will appear on Google Analytics of example.com?

Example:

Referrer site is: referrer.com

<a href="example.com" rel="nofollow"></a>

Thersathersites

Answer 1

No Change

clicking a link with rel="nofollow" will still send the current page as the referer.

A User browsing is not influenced by rel="nofollow"

nofollow applies to bots (site crawlers), google analytics tracks users (who are not bots). As such the nofollow on a link will have no effect on google analytics statistics - because it doesn't modify real-user activity.

Inflammation

@MuhammadUmer that aught to be an answer, I don't think it existed (or at least, wasn't known about) 2 years ago. That said: I wouldn't rely on it =). – Inflammation

Answer 2

nofollow is intended to prevent the bot from going TO the site in the link (or any link if it's in a meta tag).

ie: Site-A has a link:

<a rel="nofollow" href="//site-b.com">Site-B</a>

That nofollow is meant to tell Google that it shouldn't consider the two sites to be linked together. Or two pages, or whatever.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Tells Google that it shouldn't index THIS page in its search.

In your case, you're looking for a way to remove the JavaScript:document.referrer from Site-B. You can't do that from Site-A. When a user clicks from Site-A to Site-B, once they're on Site-B (where GA is installed), there's nothing that you can do from Site-A to prevent it.

There's no way to do that, without sending a user to your own server, and manually redirecting to/from elsewhere, using apache, or using some other server-side solution... Even then, the referral will come from somewhere -- it's just a case of where that somewhere, is.

HOWEVER if you're talking about two sites that YOU OWN and you're trying to exclude Site-A from Site-B's reporting, there are ways of doing that from within the GA control panel. You can add filters on the traffic to exclude IPs or domains.

Or, if you control the GA tracking codes on Site-B, you can do:

_gaq.push(["_addIgnoredRef", "Site-A.com"]);

If, however, you're working for Company-A, and you don't want people in Company-B to see your site in their report... ...that's where it can't be done without serious server-side header-manipulation.

Calcariferous

Answer 3

Yes, it will appear as a referer. Nofollow tells robots not to follow this link and doesn't affect clients browser behaviour in any way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

Placet

So referrer.com will not appear on Google Analytics of example.com but example.com has still traffic counted? – Thersathersites

It will appear on GA as referer. I fixed mistake in my answer. – Odom