Google tracking URL

Tracking URLs being used in Google SERPs

[petehall]

I performed a search and noticed our site was coming up blue instead of the usual purple.

This is because a tracking link was being used on the link to our site!

Can anyone else confirm this?

[petehall]

Nobody else has witnessed this?

[Shak]

:)

been going on for a long long long time

nowt new

shak

[kaled]

Click-tracking is certainly not new, however, I think only a small percentage of clicks are tracked, presumably as part of Google's quality-control monitoring.

Kaled.

[coconutz]

>>This is because a tracking link was being used on the link to our site!

Not only your site - all of the results for that particular keyword search. Usually lasts for only a brief period. If you notice it for all of the searches you do, delete your cookies and it'll go away. Happens from time to time.

[internetheaven]

Usually lasts for only a brief period.

Google only lets us "see" the tracking code in effect for a brief period. All links are tracked all the time, it's just that the majority of the time it is hidden in javascript in the headers.

however, I think only a small percentage of clicks are tracked,

What makes you think that? On-off-on-off tracking wouldn't really provide decent data would it?

[meowmix]

Google has indexed our tracking URLs too, so a single page is showing up multiple times in the SERPs. Not only is this diluting our inbound links, but it's also skewing our conversion tracking. Also, I'm worried that Google might view them as duplicate pages and drop our index page in favor of one of the index pages with a tracking URL on the end.

[kaled]

If your tracking urls pass through the cgi-bin, just block the cgi-bin using robots.txt

Kaled.

[insight]

Google has been tracking all clicks on its results via Javascript since its redesign (when the tabs were eliminated).

[petehall]

What I saw was a system that used tracking URLs, not JavaScript.

It was a tracking link in the format:
/url?sa=U&start=5&q=[PageURL]&e=1102

"start" indicated the SERP position and "q" the destination URL.

So the link parameters were slightly different to the current JavaScript system and the link was clearly visible when you hovered over it.

internetheaven I've never seen this before - why would they let us "see" the links at random? This does not make any sense to me.

[coconutz]

>>> why would they let us "see" the links at random?

"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...........Checking on clickthrough a miniscule amount of the time is something that we've done for a long time..."

GoogleGuy [webmasterworld.com]

[petehall]

Thanks for that coconutz :-)

Well, I suppose that makes sense then. It's the first time I have ever witnessed it myself though.