Forum Moderators: open
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 10:32 am (utc) on Mar. 30, 2004]
Welcome to webmasterworld.
In regards to your question, in a word "no"
In regards to your question, in a word "no"
In four words: "how do you know?"
Google has been serving up those tracking results (seemingly) at random, for yonks now. Also, if you try the bookmarklet to toggle google's new look, you'll see that it is a constant feature. I don't know what Google is doing with this information and nor, with all due respect, does anyone else who doesn't work for Google.
Why would Google not be interested to give this some weight as well?
I would, provided it does not get abused.
Remember DirectHit.Com?
What would have the most value is if they were able to measure time spent on site and pages viewed.
Based on recent events, since they started this "IPO adword filtering crap", I don't think they are bright enough to measure those elements.
[edited by: CCowboy at 6:20 am (utc) on Mar. 15, 2004]
If something like this isn't always on it is hard to abuse it, it is hard to even find it. And if they detect abuse from one ip address - why not just ignore it? There are a myriad of things you can do to ensure that the tracking is quality. Google buildt a search engine indexing 6 billion documents, the leading PPC program, google news and orkut. Does anyone really think they're not smart enough to build a tracking system which can account for some inividual abuse?
The issue is are the results relevant. If they are not tracking time on site and pages viewed, their tracking has no true meaning. I don't think they willing put those types of resources forward!
You sound like a top level employee, or an investment banker.
The issue is are the results relevant. If they are not tracking time on site and pages viewed, their tracking has no true meaning. I don't think they willing put those types of resources forward!
How do we know what they're tracking... I can think of plenty of things on the SERP's I'd like to track if I was at Google.
This discussion is a bit too 'black helicopter' and speculation for me, I'm bowing out.
Anywho, I'll be the guy mooning as I drive by Club Fed!
Don’t Get Excited!
At present, the links in the SERPS call:
Example:
www.google.com.au/url?sa=U&start=2&q=http://(url here)
This means that everytime you click a result, you are telling google thats where your headed, then google redirects you... i would say they would have to record this otherwise why waste the millions of hits back when everyone clicks a search result?
Notice they also have the variable start, which is equal to the ranking of the result....
perhaps they use that information to track if a visitor clicks back to the SERPS page and clicks another link or heads back to google for another non-related search later.. it could give them good info on how relevant their results are perhaps...
doubt they could use it to adjust rankings though, its not that relevant to the quality of the site... more the quality of their own results...
Thus Google is not storing information for a sample of queries as small as only 0,25%, as suggested earlier, but for much larger sample, at least for my site.
Do I look in the wrong place? I checked the source for the page and looked at the "a href" tags...
I'm sorry, but in the SERPS for a few keywords I checked it's direct links, and no redirect page.
Do I look in the wrong place? I checked the source for the page and looked at the "a href" tags...
look at the onclick attribute of the a tags.
they call a javascript function clk() with the
parameters consisting of the url, and serp placement
the function then loads an image using these
parameters.
to disable this particular tracking activity
in IE on a permanent basis, put google.com in
the restricted zone and make sure that the
restricted zone has javascript disabled
this has been verified to behave correctly
using a network sniffer.
+++
"Google have just switched their linking structure on the search results pages. About five hours ago Google.com started displaying listings but using a redirect script which looked like this:
h**p://www.google.com/url?sa=....www.example.com...
I posted this at the time and it was deleted. Now (five hours later) everything looks normal but if you check out the source code for the page you will see the following next to each href link:
onmousedown="return clk(1,this)
which if you check the header information shows the redirect url in a javascript coding."
If you like conspiracy theories, try asking Webmasterworld why three threads of mine which tried to mention the specifics of the redirect were never shown.
Infact, all of my message responses were put on hold 'for administrative review' right up until Google changed from a redirect URL to using Javascript later in the afternoon.
See msg #4, and note how often this has been talked about. There's a link at the top the definitive word from GoogleGuy, back in 2002, on the same topic...
Redirect urls on Google SERPS
[webmasterworld.com...]
[msg #46] We normally don't track redirects on urls because it slows users down. That data is useful though, so we sometimes do random sampling to make sure that our quality is still high.
msg #46] We normally don't track redirects on urls because it slows users down. That data is useful though, so we sometimes do random sampling to make sure that our quality is still high.
this is now more than a once in awhile thing. it is
now the most prevalent behaviour. at least during
the searches that i do. yours may be different.
and as unsolicited advice, they need to do more
sampling. :)
+++
