New Organic Referrer URLs from Google

Posted on April 15th, 2009 by Paula Skaper

Google is changing the way it formats referrer URLs for organic search results. The change won’t mean much for the average searcher, but could play havoc with the information in your analytics reports – especially if they’re relying on the “/search” string in the URL to identify a visitor as originating from google organic search activity. Of course, Google Analytics isn’t impacted.

The new URLs replace the relatively simple and easy to understand syntax of the URI with a complicated, abstract string of parameters that looks like a textbook “how not to format your URLs” example from a Google organic search optimization guide. No definitive answers on why the change is coming, although it’s a fairly safe assumption that the motivation is better tracking of relevance that, over time, will begin to impact organic search positioning by feeding Google’s algorithm’s more data about which results get the most activity in response to a specific keyword search.

I suspect this may be the tip of the iceberg – the real story is probably not the URL change and it’s immediate impact on third party analytics tools but the implications of new response tracking on organic search rank down the road.

Get more info at the Google Analytics Blog.

Tagged with: google • google analytics • Search Marketing • seo

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