Google Adds Ranking Data to Referrer String?

Well spotted Patrick! I noticed the landing page addition on the string, but hadnt gone into it so deep. And you are right – it would be an excellent addition to reporting if the data is inded as you demonstrate above.

If you’re logged into a Google account and perform a search you will already see this data, and it looks very, very much like the &cd= part of the string matches up with your result position in the SERPS – see this example from a search for BBC news, which naturally is in the first position in Google UK

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%2F&ei=EaPlSdvfEsGv-QbV2N2NCQ&usg=AFQjCNG1boymekvki8B_0-KpAJ7l9UjeEg&sig2=ePdap6FuYSy51aIBSEe2JA

Lower down the page, at position 13 is a Youtube video, the string for which is:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=13&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DpdyYe7sDlhA&ei=EaPlSdvfEsGv-QbV2N2NCQ&usg=AFQjCNFFcDGZWC1FpIc4qL8__xl4ANssBQ&sig2=nikbrxmWWvGRnjf86XUh8g

Blended/Universal search muddies things a bit, and local search results are at cd= position 1- 10 for some queries but it really does look like it’s reporting the position in the SERPS.

If this is rolling out to unpersonalised search as well it will be a massive help – I feel some analytics filters coming up…

I’m not holding my breath yet, but if its true it would be awesome.

These urls are visible only when logged into the Google account.

Interesting thanks Brent. The strings are not showing up for me yet.

Just noticed a couple of strings coming up and I would suggest your right as regards the URL strings as regards position

Natural result (organic position 1)
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldwidegolfshops.com%2F&ei=UDHmSYWiFsOw-AbZqoCOCQ&usg=AFQjCNE81lsFRJ1VZ8iCeIu2baPdsfoHbA&sig2=4LhPLOA-8owZ1JkKWQxS4g

PR Result (Organic position 4/Blended Position 1)
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bloomberg.com%2Fapps%2Fnews%3Fpid%3D20601079%26sid%3DaY8lJHFt0TFE%26refer%3Dhome&ei=UDHmSYWiFsOw-AbZqoCOCQ&usg=AFQjCNGXQVoF7gpsxS1jicqQk6mozV3NRQ&sig2=Egvon8gzfZiBwps_fo0Bbw

Google Products results
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.joessports.com%2Fentry.point%3Fentry%3D2964684%26source%3DCAFGL_DF%3A2964684%3AJOE%26CAWELAID%3D127391172&ei=UDHmSYWiFsOw-AbZqoCOCQ&usg=AFQjCNEcjGSal0zWlMHIE3RTwBWSDHHVGg&sig2=MPrzmPtxc3JA30BcAcyMJg

with cd certainly seemingly determing position on referrals however I would suggest this is not dependant on whether this is a blended search result or not – position 4 was the first news result (at position 4 on the page), product result (7th result – 3 organic – 3 PR)

The screenshot of the results can be found here
http://holisticsearch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/golfclubs_newurl.jpg

Makes sense that you must be logged in, as personalized search will create different results for each user. Interesting to see how this will impact Google Analytics. I bet the other analytics providers are scrambling to utilize this. James Morell mentions Analytics filters. How will that be useful here?

Well, hot damn…it looks like we have a confirmation from Mr. Cutts himself. Way cool that you figured this out!

I don’t see those strings for the natural header result (the title of the page) but I see them for the extra links given below the description is this something that is being rolled out slowly?

@Dave Culbertson You can do the same thing through advanced filters in Google analytics – it’s a bit of a pain to set up, but perfectly possible.

@Simon Pesci In the same way as you can filter for page you appear in Google using advanced filters in analytics you should be able to filter for the position you appear for a keyword. you can then set up filters for positions 1 – 3 or 10+ and work on optimising those keywords you’re not ranking for as well as you’d like.

I’m going to have a play with this over the next couple of days and see what I can come up with.

@JamesMorell – I suspected that you could create a Google Analytics filter for segmenting Google Traffic by page. Could you point me to any online examples to how to build it?

James Morell – as it stands, on the examples I have tried, none of this cd ranking data can be picked up by GA. There is a big difference between cd=1 in Google’s internal redirect URL, and the start=1 in the SERP URL.

I take it back – it seems to work in my GA, getting data through.

I concur with DangerMouse that ct/cd for ranking is incorrect–Google is actually NOT including ranking data via cd/ct (per say). They are doing it via resnum; if you do an image search (flowers) you’ll notice it specifically gives positions or if you do another search (test) you’ll see resnum within the one-line sitelinks. The resnum then will actually show the position of the results that the sitelink is under. Eg:

http://news.google.com/news?q=test&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&ei=123nSY3PI5LmnQevjuCMBw&sa=X&oi=news_group&ct=title&resnum=11

That’s for a news result in position 11 (notice resnum)

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.test.com/organizations.htm&ei=123nSY3PI5LmnQevjuCMBw&sa=X&oi=oneline_sitelinks&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=2&usg=AFQjCNGB_fgmQ6xyzxMAv3TS4OXU7RVQlw

That’s for the position one results with the middle (or second) sitelink.

God dag! Kan jag ladda ner en bild fran din blogg. Av sak med hanvisning till din webbplats!

The cd parameter seems to appear only when a user is logged in to his Google account, can someone confirm this ?

interesting. Thanks for the update.

I have been searching the net endlessly for ANY topics about this, I barely found this by accident after 15 searches. Fuck google, everytime I right-click ANY url to copy the hyperlink it auto rewrites the url & gives me all that referrer crap to make it one hell of a long link, that I have to manually trim or convert to a tinyurl. When you initially mouseover the link, you see the clean url in the statusbar. Right-click it, then mouseover the link again. Crapified.

I don’t how know they’re implementing this. I attempted blocking their http://www.google.com/extern_js/* script using Adblock Plus but that didn’t work.

This is inexcusable. Writing a greasemonkey script as we speak to strip this crap.

Hi Patrick,

Just wondered if you had heard anymore on this issue and if Google had rolled this out fully yet? Also how exactly do you see the referral strings from organic results in such a way that you can see all the variables Google use?

Thanks.

Anyone heard any more?

Very interesting, especially with the new update which means god nows when you will be position 1 or position 5, it would be useful to test how important this is.

any news on this? it would be awesome to see this and test, over time, are more accurate percentage click through for each position over the old AOL figures that have been floating around for over 5 years!

The cd parameter seems to appear only when a user is logged in to his Google account, can someone confirm this ?

I agree. I like looking at this data, but I do it manually – downloading an excel fille of complete urls.