Nov 1 2012
Google hiding search parameters in referer address
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 .
November 5, 2012 @ 12:57 pm
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January 10, 2013 @ 11:48 pm
This is just an anti competitive practice. Its data that is clearly aggregated as it is used to ‘predict’ search traffic of keywords on ads. It allows advertisers to buy ads for those keywords, but isn’t available for any organic endeavors using analytics. Google wouldn’t want someone to rank organically, if they don’t stand to make money off of it. Ads can be bought, and the keyword effectiveness realized, or you can get ‘not provided’ in analytics for free. Without the 150k to spend, I wouldn’t know for certain, but I’d venture to guess that the keyword data is available with google premium. Google is an ads company not a search company, and fairness or legality aside, its crippling to smaller businesses trying to organically rank for relevant keywords, but are unable to realize the effectiveness as it isn’t provided. All the while you can pay for the traffic/data via ads. While I don’t as frequently use Bing or Yahoo search, they don’t hide the search string. Google hiding behind the practice being a ‘privacy policy’ is humorous and insulting, when you can serve ads to that ‘private’ data at cost. The only real recourse for a small business owner is to aggregate search data from yahoo, bing, etc, and follow up with customers about how they reached your site.