TheMadScientist - 10:29 am on May 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

Only when the referrer string starts with /url rather than /search :)

I would guess it has to do with the switch to AJAX for the results, but haven't used Google enough in the last 6 months to really know and haven't looked into it that closely. I'm more concerned with long term trends and patterns right now, because sometimes I have a habit of, uh, micromanaging? if I don't do it that way and I think people who constantly 'tweak' things because of a few down days present a manipulative pattern of changes over time, so I've been tring to work with ebbs and flows and look at things over time, the same way I think they have to for rankings...

It's one of the reasons why I only made one change last week even though traffic was down, and I didn't actually do it for rankings, but more for visitors and actually did it because traffic was already down, basically thinking what could it hurt? Of course with personalization visitors more directly effect rankings, but anyway I kept asking myself what I could do better or different and the only thing I came up with was a navigational change I thought made the site easier to surf, and it seems to have worked because my page views have increased since the change, and I thought it was fairly minor, but, go figure...

NOTE WRT WATCHING TRAFFIC CLOSELY: I guess I would say I like to know what happens hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and all the little details, so I can incorporate them into a major change when it's time to do something different... Watch things closely, so you can change things wisely might be another way of putting it.