Google did roll out a change a few weeks ago, for a very small percentage of users, under 1% of users, and are doing almost what you might call a Java script enhanced search results.
You show up on Google’s page and as you typing, you can do neat things with Java script. You can try to make things faster, try to make things smoother for users… There’s a lot of really smart stuff you can do.
The team didn’t really think about refers and how that might break analytics packages and stuff downstream. It’s a very small percentage of people that this is being trialed on.
People are thinking, ‘Are there any ways to have refers’. Anything that you do is very useful if you can have refers, so if 10 years from now refers are not conventional browser sense, then maybe browsers can return everything after the # sign.
For example, even after the # sign isn’t officially part of the URL or URI, if browsers were to pass that along, that would help all sorts of refer and analytic packages.
The way that I think about it now is that we have to try experiments with how to
make search results better and faster and cleaner. It’s not the intent to break refers, but we have to keep trying out new things and we do want to have the ability where analytics packages can still continue to work.
Related posts:
- Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking? Example: example.com/keyword/London is better than example.com/London/keyword
- Does Google Analytics have plans to start adding specific tools around Web 2.0 or social media websites?
- Is Google aggregating SearchWiki data with Analytics for rankings?
- Hi Matt, could you confirm whether the geographic location of the web host has any significant ranking factors for organic SEO?
- Why are the UK SERPs still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/AUS/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June? Why do .com sites rank highly in UK SERPs?
