SearchCommands
10-25-2005, 12:08 PM
The "inurl:" search command is a useful one. It turns up all sorts of interesting odds and ends.
Imagine what it would do to your AdWords campaign if Yahoo! Slurp started to discover your AdWords links and Yahoo added these URLs to their index. Yahoo users could come to your site through links which cost you AdWord pennies.
This can happen. The most common reason why this occurs is because some scallywag has ignored Google's instructions and hardcoded the AdSense HTML into their site rather than left the JavaScript alone. Combine that with a 302 redirect rather than the 301 and we have a URL which can hang around.
An example of this can be seen by searching Yahoo for inurl:www.tesco.com/books/product (http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=inurl%3Awww.tesco.com%2Fbooks%2Fproduct&).
Here it happens a good few times and we also get to peak at lucky affiliate links with search status of their own right.
The lesson to learn here is that bullet proof tracking is very hard to achieve. Just because visitors came through an AdWords campaign URL does not necessarily mean they came through a Google powered advert.
Imagine what it would do to your AdWords campaign if Yahoo! Slurp started to discover your AdWords links and Yahoo added these URLs to their index. Yahoo users could come to your site through links which cost you AdWord pennies.
This can happen. The most common reason why this occurs is because some scallywag has ignored Google's instructions and hardcoded the AdSense HTML into their site rather than left the JavaScript alone. Combine that with a 302 redirect rather than the 301 and we have a URL which can hang around.
An example of this can be seen by searching Yahoo for inurl:www.tesco.com/books/product (http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=inurl%3Awww.tesco.com%2Fbooks%2Fproduct&).
Here it happens a good few times and we also get to peak at lucky affiliate links with search status of their own right.
The lesson to learn here is that bullet proof tracking is very hard to achieve. Just because visitors came through an AdWords campaign URL does not necessarily mean they came through a Google powered advert.