MSN squelches referrer information, hopefully by accident!
Apparently MSN’s movement to “Live Search” had a deleterious effect on referring source data coming from the search engine beginning sometime over the weekend! Have a look at the thread on the Yahoo! group started Sunday by Debora Geary.
The scariest thing is this explanation by Ian Houston of what is apparently going on over at MSN. Ian is one of the brightest guys I know so when he posts I read. Ian has this to say:
[MSN has] built their application in a way that the referrer will no longer pass. It may not be intentional but it is certainly detrimental to the web community as a whole and I would think their own sales effort as it is no longer possible to accurately see how much traffic they are sending to your site. There are obviously still some ways the referrer is passing so the script needs some more thorough evaluation for what those circumstances are. What I see in it in general terms tells me most anything coming from the search results page (especially the organic listings) should not pass a referrer unless the browser has javascript disabled.
Pretty scary, huh? Now, according to a thread over at the Search Engine Roundtable this was not intentional and MSN is working on a fix for the problem. I guess that’s one way to prevent people from putting out press releases about the quality of referring traffic your site or search engine is sending along …
Watch the Yahoo! group thread for updates on this problem. If anyone from MSN is reading my weblog I’d love to hear what you know and when you expect a solution to be pushed live.
