Windows Live Hot? You Won’t Know Since Referer Data Is Stripped

Shocking, but true, Live.com Is Not Passing Referral Information, as I reported this morning. I spent the past 30 minutes or so debating with Danny and digging through my own log files and asking DaveN for his confirmation on this. Windows Live Search, which is now the default MSN search engine strips out the referer data, so you cannot track the traffic they are sending to you. After review, it seems like Live.com is using some sort of JavaScript to do some sort of click tracking, without using a URL string to track the click. That JavaScript appears to be stripping out the referral data. So it will be hard for SEMs to determine if Live.com is hot or not.

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