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http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4129694.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 11:02 am on May 12, 2010
(utc +1)
Talking about referrals, read on, either be inspired or call me the fool who never knew! I am puzzled by this, using FF, you search G.com for a keyword you know your site is the number 1, say a news article page, now you get the search results, you see that your site is on top with 9 other sites / pages, you close the browser (FireFox). Then the mystery, your are told you had a unique visitor by you stats program on Cpa*al's latest visitors for example and even your site referrer log shows you had that visitor with the G* complete URL containing what you have just searched for, it was your IP address and you NEVER clicked to visit the site.
I tried this about 30-40 times on FF, each time the site is number one, I never click the page to go to the site, YET that search string is in my logs as a unique visitor with my IP.
If I did not spot this, I would think someone visited the site, furthermore, I'd also think that keyword is bringing in traffic when they are probably and very likely pinging every site you are looking at on the SERPs, caching them first in case you click any of them. If this is what's happening, it is not fair on Bing or Yahoo to make me think I had x0000s visitors today INSTEAD of saying your site appeared x0000 times when people searched for that keyword, some might have clicked and probably most did not click.
I disabled firebug and any other add-on / extension including the G* toolbar, always logged out from my G* account, cleared all cache, even cookies but still get this on FF.
I tried on IE, this does not happen, is G* doing the pinging from FF's Built in G* search tools, is it a persistent feature within the toolbar you can't uninstall even if you uninstall the toolbar, or am I years behind. I can understand if the pageviews feature may be enabled by default whether you like it or not, but if it was I should have the same problem on IE.
If everyone thinks the same as me and it's something new, could we have this on its own thread. Surely this has huge implications, imagine you have 1000 clickthoughs one hour from G* search results and you don't know how many are real people and how many are ONLY pings because your page was returned on the search results. They are definitely searches I made myself, no one else could possibly be doing that with my IP address at the precise time, with my exact user agent string from my machine...
Assuming I have a spyware on this machine, surely this action does not make any sense unless the spyware itself is a search engine from which I downloaded a tool or have the ware built into FF.
It can't be to do with PS, I never clicked on that keyword to come to my own site and very rarely do click to the site from G*, I am like the majority here, you search for keywords to monitor SERPs positions!
