The short answer is that there is a change on the horizon, and it’s only a small percentage of users right now, but I think that it probably will grow, and will grow over time; where Google’s referrer, that is, whenever you do a Google search and you click on a result, you go to another website and your browser passes around value called referrer.
That referrer string will change a little bit. It used to be google.com/search, for example, now it will be google.com/url.
For a short time, we didn’t have what the query was, which got a lot of people frustrated, but the google.com/search, the new referrer string, will have the query embedded in it. And there’s a quite interesting tidbit that not everybody knows. It also has embedded in that referrer string a pretty good idea of where on that page the click happened. For example, if you’re result #1, there’s a parameter in there that indicates that click came from result #1. If you’re #4, it will indicate the click came from result #4.
Now you don’t necessarily need to go scraping Google to find out what your rankings were for these queries, you can find out ‘Oh, yeah! I was #1 for this query whenever someone clicked on it and came to my website’.
That can save you a ton of work; you don’t need to worry nearly as much, you don’t need to scrape Google, you don’t have to worry about ranking reports.
We don’t promise that this will be a feature we guarantee we’ll always have on Google forever, but definitely take advantage of it now. There’s one interesting twist, which is – Google’s universal search or blended search is also taken account into results.
Imagine you’ve done search for ‘sunset’. Maybe we have three images of a sunset, and then your website is #1 for ‘sunset’. You may show up as if you’re in position #4, because those images are treated as if they’re results #1, #2, and #3. Or if you had a news results, the news headline and 2-3 links after that might be treated as regular results.
In theory, you might be thinking that you’re at position #4, when it was just that you had an image or 2-3 up ahead of you.
For the most part, this gives you an accurate idea of where on the page you were, so you get all kids of extra information you can use in your analytics, to compute your ROIs, without having to do a lot of extra work.
If you can, it’s a great idea to look at that referrer string and start to take advantage of that information.
Again, this only affects a small percentage of users right now, but we expect it will grow over time.
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