The Google May Shut Off Data

by Bob Weeks on February 4, 2009

One of the fascinating things about having a website is analyzing how people happen to visit your site. For many sites, referrals from a search engine like Google or Yahoo are a big source of visitors. This means that someone used Google to search for something, your site appeared in the results, someone clicked on the result, and therefore came to visit your site.

Generally, you can tell what search terms the visitor typed into Google or whatever when they performed the search that led them to visit your site. This is, as you might imagine, very useful information.

It’s also fun and revealing to look at this data. You’d be surprised what people from certain companies and governmental bodies are searching for.

But this valuable source of intelligence for website owners may be coming to an end. This article explains: Google’s new Ajax-powered search results breaks search keyword tracking for everyone.

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Tagged as: Computing

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

1 Anonymous February 4, 2009 at 11:59 am: I interpet this to mean that if you have Google analytics installed on your site, you’ll still get the information, but Google has found a way to remove it from external apps (like Sitemeter and Get Clicky). This would be a way for Google to provide an additional incentive for webmasters to use Google Analytics rather than one of the competing services.

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