Search Traffic Showing as Direct

[Frog]

Hi - I have been doing a lot of link building to a site and traffic is on the up from search, however, overall traffic is flying high too. it is showing as direct traffic that is on the increase, however, I am cynical as it has doubled. There is no way its branded or anything liek that.

I did read in the past that natural search traffic could show as direct, was this issue ever fixed? Also I think a lot of people are using private browsing when they come to my site, could this be impacting those numbers?

Thanks!

 

[illmasterj]

I don't have a good answer for you Frog but I feel as though I've been seeing this as well. Has yours been from June 4 (algo update) onwards?

 

[Frog]

I saw the spike around 5th may but that was around the time I made quite a few changes to the site to improve the natural traffic

 

[DarkRed]

Check discover traffic on search console. It shows as direct on Analytics.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Traffic from social media that is coming through social media browsing apps (like Facebook, Reddit, etc.) will be marked as direct. Maybe that's a part of it.

 

[illmasterj]

Yep Ryu is onto something here. I knew that Instagram used to do this but yesterday I ran a "successful" leak on Reddit and had 63 direct sessions, 13 social from Reddit. That many direct sessions is a lot more than average so I'm confident the bulk came from Reddit.