google's new ajax search

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Do no evil. Umm ya right. Supposedly they have been testing this in the Netherlands for a while.

How am I supposed to get stats quick and fast without having Google see everything?
 
Could break a lot of scrapers amongst other things.

^^ understatement of the year

Quiet before the storm?

There are BIG TIME problems that go along with this & not just for seo / keyword analytics .... P202 works on the referrer string and will die quickly if this happens on a wide scale basis and you PPCers will be fucked back into the stone ages.

As of now this stuff is isolated (still normal for me) so the time for concern is forthcoming. I think you'll see some revolt over this if it really happens, perhaps they could piss enough people that we might actually live to se the death of google ... do no evil my ass!
 
More information:
Google AJAX Search Results = Death To Search Term Tracking?

A Google spokesperson shares this statement:
“We’re continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search, please see: Official Google Blog: This is a test. This is only a test..”
 
Hey, if they roll it out, it just means more people will move their advertising spend to Yahoo and MSN. Sure, it'll make those more expensive for substantially less traffic , but it may teach Google the lesson it richly needs.
In terms of SEO for your site, yeah, a bit fucked, but it's not like the volume on the other SEs is so low that you won't be able to get decent metrics off of those instead. It's just shifting the evil over to somewhere else. And you can bet your arse the 3rd party analytics providers will move their code to pull from one of the other big two.
And making it work on Javascript is a surefire way to kill of mobile internet. Most mobile browsers don't support it properly. Hell, I've got Opera 9 running on my phone, and plenty of sites are still fucked even though it's supposed to be compatible.
 
Google accounts for 99% of my organic search traffic. (last 30 days : G 1,223 hits , live 7 , msn 6 , yahoo 5, ask.com 4 )
Shit... ok... I didn't realise there was that much a discrepancy. I'm getting about 20% of my search traffic from from MSN and Y!, and about another 2% from other SEs (I got a hit from Cuil on a site. How fucking weird, right?).
Then again, I'm also getting about 40% of my overall traffic from referring sites most of the time thanks to all the link spamming on social bookmark sites and clever inserts into high traffic Wikis other than Wikipedia.
 
This step is actually not surprising. If you want to maximize revenue, you have to look at all possible factors which might lower it, and try to eliminate them. That's what you do on a daily basis too, or no?

The possibility to rank organically "on purpose" is such a factor and offers potential AdWords clients an alternative route via SEO. This is clearly an attempt to make SEO less of an alternative to PPC, by making it harder to rank organically.

And saying "it's a test" is pure public relations. Of course it's a test - don't make the mistake to connote "test" with "it's not sure if we will make this permanent". Of course it will be permanent.

When you test something, you are looking to optimize, tweak and finalize it, with the goal to release it sooner or later. Saying "it's only a test" does not anwer the question whether it is considered to be permanent or not. Read between the lines people.

I'm 100% sure this will be made permanent in all countries/datacenters. Sooner or later.
 
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