{"id":118,"date":"2009-04-16T04:09:03","date_gmt":"2009-04-16T10:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/?p=118"},"modified":"2009-04-16T04:09:40","modified_gmt":"2009-04-16T10:09:40","slug":"google-starts-sending-ranking-data-in-referrer-strings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/16\/google-starts-sending-ranking-data-in-referrer-strings\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Starts (Secretly?) Sending Ranking Data in Referrer Strings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogstorm.co.uk\/google-adds-ranking-data-to-referrer-string\/\">Patrick Altoft<\/a> has voiced his guess about a change in Google referrer strings. It appears that Google now adds the ranking data to the referrer string (for those less technical, the Google SERPs page a visitor has arrived from to a site):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;ct=res&amp;cd=7&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&amp;ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&amp;rct=j&amp;q=flowers&amp;usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&amp;sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the cd=7 (click detail = 7th?) is the ranking and ct=res (click through = results?) is indicating that the click came from organic search rather than a universal search (news or video) result<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Upon seeing this post, I rushed to check my own logs and have noticed a couple of similar referrer URLs. However, the ones I have seen in my logs had the traditional <em>\/search?<\/em> element in them, not the new \/url? <a href=\"http:\/\/analytics.blogspot.com\/2009\/04\/upcoming-change-to-googlecom-search.html\">promised<\/a> by the Google Analytics blog this Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s surprising about this whole story, however, is that the Google Analytics blog has been the only place so far to ever mention the referrer string changes &#8211; and there has been no official comment anywhere as to whether or not Patrick&#8217;s guess was correct and Google indeed includes the ranking data into these strings. Matt Cutts has commented vaguely on Patrick&#8217;s blog in the key of\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;if you experiment some you will confirm your guess &#8221; and tweetted advising &#8220;all SEOs&#8221; to read Patrick&#8217;s post. Well if this is true and all SEOs need to be aware of it why not do an official post or at least a post at Matt Cutt&#8217;s blog? Google&#8217;s public relations with SEOs amaze me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Patrick Altoft has voiced his guess about a change in Google referrer strings. It appears that Google now adds the ranking data to the referrer string (for those less technical, the Google SERPs page a visitor has arrived from to a site): http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;ct=res&amp;cd=7&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&amp;ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&amp;rct=j&amp;q=flowers&amp;usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&amp;sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw Perhaps the cd=7 (click detail = 7th?) is the ranking and ct=res [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions\/121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}