I have been looking at live.com, which is Microsoft’s new look search engine or something. It has some interesting features like a never ending page of results that you slide through. Hurray, everyone is on page one. And there are some nice feature in the image search.
But then I got a referral from live.com in my web analytics reports. Naturally, I was intrigued. Now, ranking for something in Microsoft SERPs is not particularly hard, but I am always glad for a little search engine love. So naturally I drilled into the referring information to see what search phrase brought this particular visitor. Unfortunately, there was no keyword information for that referral. Suddenly my head was filled with ideas of writing a nice how-to piece on getting keyword reporting for live.com in Google Analytics. I always like to write Google Analytics pieces. But as I was doing a wee bit of research it became disturbingly clear that this was not going to be the case. Microsoft wasn’t passing the search phrase in the referrer field. COME ON! This is search engine 101. By having the search phrase in the query string of the referring URL you allow people to understand what keywords and phrases are driving traffic to their site.
Sheesh, come on people get your act together over there.
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