Why haven't I visited my site?

Some searches are not showing visited links

[Powdork]

I often will set my preferences to show 100 results and then scroll through quickly to find my site using the fact that pages in my history show up in purple.Last night this got a little strange. My site will be highlighted for some searches but not on others. It seems like I have to visit my site from that search query for it to be highlighted.

[tedster]

Sometimes Google does some click-tracking, and that changes the URL for some of their results -- for the short period of time they are taking their stats only. Think that might be it?

[decaff]

Powdork...

I believe that for a link/description to show purple in the SERPS (with the preferences set to 100) you actually have to visit that individual page and have that in your browser history..
If Google is resetting links for tracking purposes on the fly (and you happen to be in a competitive industry sector ;-) .... then your history would not reflect the listing that Google may be click tracking in the SERPS..

The other way you can do this is to use your "find" function in your browser and type in the url string...this will find any string of text within the 100 results returned..
You could save all your desired url strings in a simple text file and then copy and paste into the find function as you search....a bit cumbersome...but more accurate then the history search via purple text if things have changed...

Another trick (but you need to be very familiar with your page <title>'s to use this) is to go google and add this /ie on the backside of the url in location bar and this will bring back numbered result sets ...

[Powdork]

but here's the weird part
For one search (location keywords) it is highlighted.
For another (fullnameof location keywords) it is not.
Both appear to be using tracking. Hovering over the listing brings up
Shortcut to &e=7249 in the display bar for both searches.

<added>This started happening at the same time as I started receiving related searches [webmasterworld.com], which may be related.</added>

[Powdork]

The related searches are gone today and the visited links are back to normal.