On Tuesday, Google announced that they will be changing the URL string from Google search. We picked up on this for further investigation, to check that Apollo Analytics would not have any problems tracking data.
However, others have been looking in more detail at the other elements in the string, and Patrick Altoft pointed out that there is a new element cd which seems to be an indication of the position of the result in the SERP at the time of the click.
Later, Patrick’s blog was commented on by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam who also tweeted that all SEOs should read Patrick’s post (thanks to IrishWonder for the heads up)
If this is true, then integration with Analytics packages (taking this information from the referrer string) may herald a reduction in the automated rank checking that Google hates so much. Ranking reports are controversial but they are still part of the process of search engine optimisation at the moment, unless this new query string does away with the need for them, which is a definite possibility and would be a very clever move by Google.
Related posts:
