Alta adds session ids to click through strings

[Brett_Tabke]

Mouse over any search result url and you'll see new session ids in the click through string. It appears they are finally working the click through data into the search results.

[Ted]

Only on AltaVista.com so far.
The local versions stil don't track click through.

[seth_wilde]

Was this something temporary?...... I'm not seeing it....

[Brett_Tabke]

Still there right now Seth: mouse over for example [altavista.com]

ck_sm and ref= are the ids.

[seth_wilde]

that's wierd....I tried it in both IE and Netscape and still couldn't get AV to do it for me.... and then I had marcia try it and she isn't getting them either..... My first thought was that it was some regional thing, but with you being in Iowa and Ted being in Sweden I don't see much in common....... Any thoughts?

[Ted]

If you search for webmasterworld [altavista.com] in AV.com, you will find this forum listed second.

The actual code behind the listing looks like this:

<a href="/r?ck_sm=ae9ed15b&ref=20080&r=http://www.webmasterworld.com/" onMouseOver="status='http://www.webmasterworld.com/'; return true;">Webmaster World</a></b>

A click on the link will be counted by AV and redirected to webmasterworld.com.

[seth_wilde]

Thanks Ted, didn't even think to check the source, I was under the assumption that you guys where seeing this on rollover....

[FreeBee]

If AV are going to include clickthrus into their algo - would they build up this data over a period of time or is there a chance that the info may be influencing SERP's almost immediately?

[Brett_Tabke]

Click throughs have been on AV most of the year (or longer?). The only thing new, is the session ids. The session ids then could each click as unique. You can't up the click popularity by clicking yourself. Well, you can, but you have to get a new session id when involves nuking cookies and who knows whatelse.

[WebGuerrilla]

I'm not sure it is a session ID. When I go to AV (I've tried it both with and without cookies turned on) and type in a search for webmasterworld, I get the exact same URL Ted posted.

When I started doing other searches, I found that the first chunk of the string is unique to each URL. The second chunk is always one of two numbers.

ref=4000020080&r or

ref=20080&r=

I'm don't see how this can be tracking individual users when two different people on two separate machines are getting served the same string.

Any ideas??

[Brett_Tabke]

I've been trying to figure it out since the numbers coming in on some referrals are different than I get when I search. Country/Zone of origin? Or possibly a date coding?