It’s against the standard and I have seen many a web server which just plain break when given anything outside of a normal URL (Java web servers pop to mind, in particular.)

So, would Google risk having their browser break on some web servers? Doubtful.

Some may have noticed recently (within the last 2-3 months, I would say) that Google modified their tracking which links you click as you exit their site. As I often do right-click “Copy this link” on SERP pages to bookmark things for my blog, I noticed a lot of them redirected through Google. Checking today, this has been changed, again.

For a brief period (after I checked again) they were redirecting organic search links through google.com in order to track them for a short period. Now it appears that they are tracking exit links using Javascript (what, no GA?). Look at each organic link on the page’s source:

onclick=”return clk(this.href,”,”,’res’,'4′,”)”

I offer a detailed analysis of this internal tracking over at my personal blog, as this in particular is off-topic, but it reminds me of the quick technical solution which lets Google use AJAX and analytics to continue peacefully is:

- Use AJAX to perform their search using the URL fragment to “hone in” on results (http://www.google.com/#q=roi+tracking)

- Upon the outbound click, redirect through Google.com without using a referrer-killing HTTP status

(that is, Google.com servers would NOT use a 3xx HTTP status so the referrer is preserved as the outbound page containing the query string)

- Everybody wins.

If Google chooses to kill referrers, and the main source of SEO goodness, then I think it’s best to rethink their “Do no evil” mantra.

Just so you know though, it looks like they have cut way down on the testing it right now. It might be related to the fact that they were only testing one browser, and Firefox updated last week to a newer version. Or they may have just slowed way down because it drew too much attention. Not sure. You should still be able to see what I was talking about though if you restrict your stats report to Feb 1st through Feb 5th. For that period a little more than 25% of my Google traffic was direct, without keywords passed.

Which Google Analytics report did your screen shot come from? Was that the Keywords report under Traffic Sources? I just want to check and see if there is something similar showing for our accounts. As you can probably tell, my knowledge on all this is a little limited. And I apologize if this question already arose; I didn’t take the time to read through all the comments.

I do hope they’re being honest about the fact that they have no intention of disrupting referrer tracking and they are continuing to iterate, because if they do roll this out they are going to break a lot of successful business models.

However, I suppose we can take some solace in the fact that rolling out this change would in fact break Urchin, because, I agree with Cristi, it seems unlikely that Google would do that.

Or perhaps a more ugly solution, having a form of redirect before being sent to your final search-result page.