Google adds rank information to referral URLs

An interesting post on the official Google Analytics blog from Brett Crosby appeared last week, in which he announced that Google is to start introducing a new URL format in its referring click-through URLs for organic (i.e. non-paid) results. From Brett’s post:

Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages. Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term "flowers", for example, would be something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Now you will start seeing some referrer strings that look like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Brett points out that the referring URL now starts with /url? rather than /search? (which is interesting in itself in its implication for the way Google is starting to think about its search engine as a dynamic content generation engine); but the really interesting thing, which Brett doesn’t call out but which was confirmed by Jason Burby in his ClickZ column today, is the appearance of the cd parameter in the revised URL, which indicates the position of the result in the search results page (SRP). So in the example above, where cd=7, the link that was clicked was 7th in the list.

As Jason points out, this new information is highly useful for SEO companies, who can use it to analyze where in the SRPs their clients’ sites are appearing for given terms. Assuming, of course, that web analytics vendors make the necessary changes to their software to extract the new parameter and make it available for reporting (or, alternatively, you use a web analytics package that is flexible enough to enable you to make this configuration change yourself).

As you can see from the example above, there are various other new parameters that are included in the new referring URL, which may prove useful from an analytics perspective (such as the source parameter). It’s also worth noting that whereas the old referring URL is the URL of the search results page itself, the new URL is inserted by some kind of redirection (this must be the case, since it includes the URL of the click destination page).

Using a redirect in this way means that as well as providing more information to you, Google is now also capturing more information about user click behavior, since the redirect can be logged and analyzed. Crafty, huh?