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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

          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

            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

              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

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