Okay so Google addressed the Instant Previews pageview count issues for their analytics. But now we have to ask how is this effecting counts in all other programs.
Just in case the companies have not seen the numerous mentions on Twitter and various forums and blogs, those little popups of people's websites in the Google search results were being counted as pageviews in Google Analytics.
Any website owner who had not know of this - the problem is fixed in GA but there is no way to delete the inflated pageview counts prior to the fix.
UPDATE: Omniture got back to me. Benjamin Gaines told me "You have now heard from us, eh? Not blocking by default. Easy to exclude with a bit of JS code."
If you want to know how many there were you can use a little filter WebShare created.
But the bigger question is how much is this screwing with the numbers of all other analytics programs? If you want to stop it on your site's end before the companies get to it or let people know it is not an issue, you can block the user agent in your robots.txt file.
User Agent is Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13 - thank you Keri Morgret.
Webtrends Q&A on Twitter tweeted this: "We aren't really seeing a problem but we can filter out by the user agent." I asked Omniture and Coremetrics as well on Twitter but no reply as of yet.
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