Words from Alejandro U. Alvarez
Windows Live users being a bit weird…
I use for my blog statistics both StatPress and Google Analytics, since both offer different things, and I was checking my referrers to see what do people search to get to my blog, to optimize my text and keywords to rank higher for those keywords, when I found a very strange thing:
Google users usually use relatively "complex" search queries, like the following:
round corners+design+js
how to make a php mirc bot
And that is (I think) the normal thing to do when you are searching right? So then I find that about 0.13% of the total number of visits come from Windows Live, although it is still a pretty high number. And I then in Google Analytics checked to see what were the keywords they were using, and it turns out that about 99% of the people that use Windows Live Search use only ONE keyword!
The arrive somehow to my site searching one word!:
urbano
little
easter
image
design
robots
...
These were the latest search keywords used, and I thought it might be a problem in the way StatPress and Google Analytics get the search query terms from the referrer URI, but when I did a long phrase search and clicked on my blog, the whole query appeared perfectly, so it is true that most Windows Live users really search one word...
Unbelievable, if I had never seen it I would never have thought of it...
Click to enlarge [In the picture I've remover all the visits from other Search Engines for clarity]
I don’t think it’s a 1 word search, but I’ve seen that TOO! On several sites…. what the heck is that? And when I look at Live’s search results using the single word… my sites aren’t there.
Yea, I found at first weird that the search was only 1 word, but my site NEVER appears in the search results.
Still, the error is not in the way StatPress or Analytics get the keywords from the referrer, because if you do yourself a test and search for multiple words it works fine!
Simply weird things happening!
And it doesn’t happen a lot.. only 2 or 3 times per week.