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MSN traffic suddenly showing up as no referrer?   Message List  
Reply | Forward Message #7833 of 24282 |
Anyone else noticing this with their MSN traffic? As of last
Thursday, several of my clients saw a drop of 70-90%+ in their MSN
traffic. At the same time, there was a similarly sized increase
in "no referrer" traffic.

We first noticed this with one of my clients gets who about 50,000
visitors a day. We've confirmed that SERPs haven't changed, and the
traffic that does show up is using the same types of searches as
usual. (In one
of those bizarre web analytics moments, this client happens to have
changed to a new server last Wednesday, so we went down the garden
path with this one until I realized several other clients were showing
the same pattern).

The only thing I can figure is that this might have something to do
with MSN changing to Live Search last week
http://livesearch.spaces.live.com/blog/cns%218560B877FE8E9138%
21608.entry ?

Debora










Sun Sep 17, 2006 8:38 pm

dgeary9
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Message #7833 of 24282 |
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Anyone else noticing this with their MSN traffic? As of last Thursday, several of my clients saw a drop of 70-90%+ in their MSN traffic. At the same time,...
Debora Geary
dgeary9
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Sep 18, 2006
3:22 am

Hi Debora, You are right.. MSN is transferring all its traffic to Live Search. By the way some my clients have changes theirs SERP in the new version so your...
Adrian Coutin
acoutin_2000
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Sep 18, 2006
12:42 pm

... Hi Deborah, seeing the same thing here, the trafic is going in 'beta.search.live.com', for all related MSN searches, http://search.msn.com redirecting to...
Mathieu Jondet
mjondet
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Sep 18, 2006
12:47 pm

OK Matt, I dug into this a little further. I just looked at the raw server logs. We are getting a very small amount of traffic ( less than one hand full) from...
Liz Donaldson
donaldson_liz
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Sep 18, 2006
5:11 pm

... Hi Liz, indeed there seems to be different situations, for example : * if you go to http://fr.msn.com/ and do a search you are on ...
Mathieu Jondet
mjondet
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Sep 18, 2006
6:37 pm

... use ... US&form=QBRE&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Search ... engines in ... Hi Mathieu, thanks for the reply. It seems more complex than the referrer switching names...
Debora Geary
dgeary9
Offline Send Email
Sep 18, 2006
5:14 pm

... Hi Debora, you are right, I think this is how they are doing the redirection right now : 1. each result in the page has the following link : <a ...
Mathieu Jondet
mjondet
Offline Send Email
Sep 18, 2006
6:32 pm

... use ... US&form=QBRE&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Search ... engines in ... Hi Mathieu, thanks for the reply. It seems more complex than the referrer switching names...
Debora Geary
dgeary9
Offline Send Email
Sep 18, 2006
5:14 pm

It's pretty strange that MSN apparently didn't give the analytics vendors a heads up on this. Seems to me it's to their advantage to appear high on the...
Chris Grant
chrisgrantaa
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Sep 18, 2006
6:31 pm

Doesn't look like it was on purpose... :)......
Debora Geary
dgeary9
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Sep 18, 2006
9:28 pm

Mathieu, When you say that the regular expressions on your search engine software are not updated, are you referring to the internal web analytics software...
Jodi McDermott
jodi.mcdermott@...
Send Email
Sep 18, 2006
6:36 pm

If you take a look at the first javascript loaded into a search results page on search.msn.com (live.js) you will see that they have writen the script to...
Ian Houston
ishouston
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Sep 18, 2006
9:16 pm

WebTrends users have to do this to update their search engine identification file: In your installation directory locate two files called keywords.ini. In each...
Chris Grant
chrisgrantaa
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Sep 18, 2006
6:39 pm

Debora, I am also seeing the same behavior. There are some discussions concerning this subject out in the SEM/SEO forums . Unfortunately there are no answers...
Liz Donaldson
donaldson_liz
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Sep 18, 2006
5:14 pm

From: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006183.html MSN Says Live.com Referral Bug "Not By Design" Friday we reported that [MSN] Live.com Is Not Passing...
jay.allen@...
jays_work_comp
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Sep 18, 2006
6:29 pm

You're not the only one... http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006183.html To: webanalytics@...: acoutin_2000@...: Mon, 18 Sep 2006...
Jarid Lukin
jarid
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Sep 18, 2006
6:29 pm

Thanks Jay and Jarid. Good to know I didn't just fall by myself into an alternate analytics universe! ... 0700Subject: Re: [webanalytics] MSN traffic suddenly...
Debora Geary
dgeary9
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Sep 18, 2006
9:27 pm

Deborah, That is correct. It seems that Live.com is not passing referrer information Check out this blog entry ...
Steve J Racicot
steve_racicot
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Sep 18, 2006
6:35 pm
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