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  4. Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?

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Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?

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  • RCF
    RCF Subscriber last edited by Jul 15, 2013, 4:22 PM

    Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics.

    These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3").

    This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines.

    Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs.

    Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • RCF
      RCF Subscriber @Mark_Ginsberg last edited by Jul 15, 2013, 6:43 PM Jul 15, 2013, 6:43 PM

      Thanks for the regex insight, Mark.

      I haven't been able to find a common denominator yet, but I'll keep looking.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Mark_Ginsberg
        Mark_Ginsberg last edited by Jul 15, 2013, 10:48 PM Jul 15, 2013, 6:12 PM

        Not sure why this is growing recently, but when learning regex for Google Analytics with the awesome LunaMetrics regex guide, I remember coming across the need to write brand names for advanced segments and to cover the possibility of two words being written with or without a space. Don't remember exactly where I saw it, but since then I've been writing them this way (\s|+), if I were writing seomoz for a brand advanced segment, and wanted to cover seo moz and seomoz, I would do it seo(\s|+)?moz

        Basically, the regex for a space is \s, but analytics sometimes treats spaces as +, so to cover your bases, you do it either with a \s or a +.

        My point is, this has been around for a while - not sure why the sudden increase, but I know this has been around for quite a bit. Maybe try drilling down a bit and seeing if you can find a common denominator here about the traffic and what is causing it.

        Mark

        RCF 1 Reply Last reply Jul 15, 2013, 6:43 PM Reply Quote 1
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