Nov 1 2012

Google hiding search parameters in referer address

By • SEO • 2 • Tags: , , , ,

This specific content was written 12 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Greetings,

While checking my statscounter/analytics today and noticed that the number of links starting with the following had increased:
www.google.gr/url?sa=t&rct=j
OR
www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j

What I don’t like with these links is that I can no longer know what search was used to land the users on my page, in order to be able to tweek my SEO, and know what content is more demanded.

Reading a bit more about this I found out its’ google’s new policy to hide the search parameters for users privacy – Ok I can understand that.

There is however the opinion that this data is for sale if your an advertiser who is paying them (I have not confirmed this).

More information on this from designer Tim Minor in his blog post: Deconstructing Google url search parameters .