Analytics Shows Keyphrase Not Used to Find Site

[roodle]

Hi,

This is something I've noticed over the past months and now I'm curious as to whether other people see this type of thing.

Analytics seems to show keyphrases that I've used in checking a website's rankings, even though I don't actually visit the website via that particular search. So it's registering a search for "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3" as a visit, even though I'm consciously not clicking through. And I'm absolutely sure it's me from the location data for the keyphrase.

What I think may be happening though is that any subsequent visit to the site, not via Google, is somehow being picked up as a Googled visit.

I realise I can exclude my browser from the Analytics stats, but I think it's more important to find out whether this is some sort of defective behaviour?

Anyone else seen this?

[tedster]

By any chance are you using Firefox with prefetch enabled?

[roodle]

I am using Firefox yes. I have no idea about prefetch, but if it's enabled by default then the answer would be yes!

[tedster]

Here you go, instructions from the Mozilla Support page: Firefox makes unrequested connections [support.mozilla.com]

[dstiles]

Don't I have a memory that google also (used to?) prefetch the top result?

[roodle]

So does this mean that potentially anyone using Firefox who's unaware (as I'm sure most users would be) of prefetch would be causing erroneous stats on Analytics?

[g1smd]

Yep.

[roodle]

Oh....

[dstiles]

There's a report on the dynamoo security blog today (20 sept) concerning a vulnerability in using the "suicidally stupid" prefetch feature, also thought to be in IE8 and IE9 (anyone know if it is?).

Initially the reporter thought he'd clicked through on a google link, but that wasn't so. The combination of circumstances meant that the browser tried to load content from a bad site just through googling for something. It got trapped through a faulty security cert popup but could possibly have pulled a bad download. Worth a read.

From my security logs, which include prefetch info, I see very few prefetches (522 so far this month), which suggests a lot of people have it turned off. But if it's a default then I wonder if this is true (people do not usually fiddle), or if something else like NoScript prevents it (as far as I know NoScript does not). Certainly on all my machines the feature is User-Set to false, which implies it's on by default.

Turn off prefetch in Firefox or other Mozilla browser by putting about:config into the browser Location bar, promising to be careful and setting network.prefetch-next to false.

As to google prefetch, which I mentioned above, it seems this is only true when using google accelerator.