Is there a way to tell which redirect - from another domain - is driving traffic to your website?

[Blenny]

My company acquired another domain/website several year's ago. We want to see - for accounting purposes, how much traffic/revenue that site's REDIRECTS are driving to our website now. Is there any way to pull this information?

I thought of comparing when the site was originally redirected to our traffic/revenue changes - but so much has changed from the acquisition that I wouldn't have faith in this value. Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

[Mobilio]

You can see this from Google Analytics. Should be in referral traffic as traffic source.

Another way to check this is from web server logs. You should see all referral traffic from specific URL/pattern.

[Blenny]

Thanks Peter.

The source does not show up in our analytics. To be clear, the site is no longer active, we just redirected its major URL's to appropriate locations of our website.

We can definitely try to take a look at the server logs though, - thanks!

[LoganRay]

Hi,

You're probably seeing this as direct traffic in Google Analytics - which is totally useless. The only way around this is to append UTMs with source/medium information to the end of the resolving URL. For example:

theDomainYouBought.com >>> yourCurrentDomain.com/?utm_source=theDomainYouBought.com&utm_medium=301

You can replace '301' and the source info with whatever you want, but the more specific you are, the easier it will be to go back and look at the data months/years from now.

[Blenny]

Thanks Logan -

Just to be clear - in the redirect file then, we'd have a setup which is basically (old domain url) directed to (new domain url+utm parameters?).

That's interesting. I'd never heard of using the UTM codes in a redirect file.

[LoganRay]

That's correct. I started doing this as a way to determine which 301s can be removed over time, but I come across new uses for it all the time!

[Blenny]

Nice. My last question, if you don't mind is - do you feel there would be an impact to rankings/traffic if we went back - a year and a half later - to edit the redirect file?

[LoganRay]

Doubtful - since you've had redirects in place for so long, Google most likely dropped the old domain(s) from the index long ago.