When reviewing its Google Analytics, I saw the domain name was included in the Referral section. And the figure from this domain was more than 3 thousands visitors a day. This case is called Self-Referral.

As far as I know, self-referring often happens in 3 common cases thanks to Google Adwords Support.

1. Tracking code not installed on all of the web pages: If the tracking
   code is not installed on all of your webpages, Google Analytics will not
   be able to track the referral webpage and will assume the previous page to
   be a referral. For example, http://www.domain.com/forum does not have
   the analytics tracking code installed. Visits from this page could be
   construed as referrals.
2. Redirect: Generally, a website may appear as a self-referral if there
   is a redirect. If a website redirects from www.example.com to
   www.domain.com, Google Analytics will record the referral as
   www.example.com. When the user is redirected, the tracking code records
   the referral source as website the user was redirected from. If there is a
   redirect on your website, we suggest you remove the redirect or add the
   redirected URL as the Website URL in your account. Your webmaster or your
   hosting company should be able to assist you in removing the redirect.
3. Frames: Frames may also result in self-referrals. This is because a
   frame in your website may be used to load another webpage.

So if you get the same issue, that is Self-Referral in Google Analytics, please check if you’re in 1 of above cases to have the appropriate solution.

Recently, some webmasters who have some basic SEO pointed out that Alexa ranks mean less or even nothing if your site does not have real visitors. Some say Alexa is simply incorrect (at least for Vietnam) and not a good standard for website traffic tracking and measuring. You yourself can see this by just taking a look at Alexa top 100 of Vietnam: there are many foreign strangle sites in the list (that we’ve never known before).

Also, SEO-based webmasters suggest a free tool from Google, Analytics, for more accurate figures, regardless of updates/ improvements of Alexa ranking algorithms in April 2008.

However, Vietnam advertisers are too familiar with Alexa and they still strongly believe in its figures. Maybe webmasters need time to persuade advertisers not to completely rely on Alexa when evaluating a website’s traffic.

Zing, a brand new branch of Vinagame (who is the most successful investor in Vietnam MMORPG with Vo Lam Truyen Ky) has been working hard for more than 1 year to become the no.1 local website. In a short time, they’ve launched big sites like Yobanbe.zing.vn, Mp3.zing.vn, Chat.zing.vn (now redirects to City.zing.vn), Movie.zing.vn, Star.zing.vn, News.zing.vn, etc. About diversity and rate of development, no other company can compare with Vinagame within the last 12 months. In July 17, they announced that Zing had become the no.1 site in Vietnam. According to experts, it was VietBao.vn (a well-optimized news site with huge traffic) helping Zing by redirecting traffic to News.zing.vn for about 1 week. At that time, VietBao was banned for publishing news without any legal license from the state (now alive though).

Of course this news made FPT unpleased. Their well-known website VNExpress.net has been at the leading position for years (even this site used to rank in top 100 worldwide). They realised that subdomains could help and one of the visible methods they carried out was to group other existing sites under the main domain VNExpress.net such as Phimanh.vnexpress.net, Ngoisao.vnexpress.net, Gamethu.vnexpress.net, etc. Last week they gained what they want: return to the first position for Vietnam websites.

This Alexa race is interesting. And who will win?

Vietnam internet users! Remember Content is King, don’t you?

It’s amazing that from the tab Google Trends for Websites also includes Also visited and Also searched for stats, helping us keep track of related websites and search terms.

This new feature becomes really a big challenge for other tracking puclic web tools such as Quantcast, Compete, or Alexa, etc.

But it’s odd that the Google family like Google.com, Youtube.com, Gmail.com, etc is not public in this tracking feature. According to Googler Matt Cutts, maybe Google worries that people would take the traffic estimates as some sort of forward-looking guidance and possibly misinterpret it. Also Matt confirms that this new feature is just in Google Labs launch and maybe Google would consider it an early-stage feature.

Update:

The reason why Google doesn’t show up its properties is explained as followed:

“We do not show Google.com properties on Trends for Websites. We have policy of not providing interim financial guidance, and have decided not to release Google numbers in accordance with that policy.”

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/google-to-unveil-new-ad-planning-tool/