Your search referrals are all wrong Are not entirely accurate

One of the things we like more than any other when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of our SEO efforts is checking the rankings to see what we may be up against when we have our latest incarnation indexed.

We have our page indexed and over a short amount of time we have search traffic trickling though, we check what they have used to find the page through our keyword referral reports via our analytics providers. On occasion we may see a referral in there that we did not expect, something completely unrelated to the page and reproducing it is near impossible.

This is ordinarily a rare event, but thanks to Google Instant that rare event has just become more common. It is very easy to reproduce. It`s around about now I should really show you how.

As an example I have titled this post “pretty pink little pixies with mohicans” which is an extension of a conversation today in the SEO Dojo. For demonstration purposes only, I will use that exact term via Google Instant which will show up in the referral logs of the site I am about to visit.

While they may scratch their heads thinking how the hell can their post/site rank for that term a search for it will show this post.

Now I know what you may be thinking “Why would anyone search that way?” but if truth be told how often do you search? How often do you get what you are after 1st time? So the odds of an unrelated referral happening this way through the AJAX method Google Instant uses is greatly increased and this in turn will lead to inaccurate data for keyword/phrase referrals.

Seemingly an innocent search behaviour you may think, but what of privacy?

So I have searched for Busty Belindas hit enter… but wait a second I need to check my bank account! So I use Instant and seek out my bank and click on through the link without ever using the search button or hitting enter.

Now my bank has in its referral logs a search referral for Busty Belindas!! and matches this against my IP for previous visits. This is not something you would want to share right?

You see where I have gone with this.

Not only is this data useless when we are trying to track search referrals to ours/client sites we now have an instance of completely unrelated terms coming into our reports.

Can we use this data to our advantage?

Well yes and no.

• Yes because we can now profile those IP addresses against search behaviour
• No because it is surely an invasion of their privacy

Be careful how you search and consider these new terms that will appear by pixie magic in your reports.