For those who practice SEO, keyword rankings in search engines are similar to shares on the stock market. The rise and fall of keyword rankings can sometimes mean the difference between a website making millions or nothing at all. For that reason, search engine optimizers use applications that help track search engine result pages – commonly known as SERP Trackers.
While most SERP Trackers are great at monitoring keyword ranking trends, all of them suffer from the same problems, which include:
- To Many Variables – With the onset of universal, personalized and local results, actual keyword ranking can be different for different users
- Difficult to Get Results – Google previously provided an API that would return search results (and therefore ranking data), but they abandoned it a couple years ago and introduced a crippled AJAX version. They still allow access to their old search API, but it’s not supported, isn’t available to new users and provides notoriously bad data.
- Uses Server Resources – With the lack of a commercially available API, most (if not all) SERP Trackers rely on some method of scraping to get their data. Most legitimate businesses do not like doing this, but have no other choice.
Although there will always be a problem with having too many variables in search results, there are some very good solutions for alleviating the need to scrape search engines for ranking results. The first and best solution would involve a commercially licensed search API by Google. However, Google has been very clear that they’re not interested in doing that. The next solution, and one that wouldn’t involve the need for an API or license, would be to append the referral string with ranking data – something I’ve wanted and requested from Google for years. Well, it looks like my second solution and wish may have come true.
Google Analytics recently announced the addition of new referrer strings that will be slowly rolled out into search results. Although they didn’t spell it out in their blog entry, Patrick Altoft was keen enough to discover that they were including the search result page and rank in the string. Furthermore, Matt Cutts confirmed his assumption in a comment on that entry.
For search engine optimizers, there’s good and bad news with this announcement.
Why It’s Good
- Alternative to scraping and using up unnecessary server resources
- Costs Google (theoretically) nothing to provide this change
- Improves ability to track real-time changes and trends from referral stats
- Encourages the current SEO trend of focusing on performance and not just rankings
Why It’s Still Not Enough
- Ranking results are only provided when a user clicks on search results
- There’s still a need to mine search result data, something only a commercial API (or scraper) can do
The introduction of these referral strings is certainly a step in the right direction for Google. It may not be everything that Internet marketers want, but it’s certainly better than the ranking results currently provided by Google Webmaster Tools. If these changes are fully implemented on all of their search results, expect to see updates to Google Analytics and many popular analytics packages soon after.
Lastly, I’d like to say to the person or persons at Google who introduced this feature, thank you!
Jon Henshaw is currently the Product Manager for Raven Internet Marketing Tools, a multi-user Web-based application for managing SEO and Social Media Marketing campaigns.
I would strongly advise NOT to use the referrer URL as an instrument to measure ranking positions. I consider it unreliable data.
Images for example or not taken into account and if If I were starwars.com and would be checking my rankings for keyword campaign on ‘Darth Vader’ I would be disappointed to read I am now on position 6 instead of 2.
( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=darth+vader&pws=0 )
sounds like good news. looking forward to seeing this info in my analytics.
there’s one thing i don’t get though and i have to ask…why the kl.am urls on your anchor text links?
how hard is this going to be to integrate into Raven Seo Tools? btw.. good article..
I am actually really excited about this! From a developer’s view point it is always really exciting to see a big company hand over more data to the public!
@Kimber – sent the kl.am links with my original article to the editor because the original links were so long in my document. The editor decided to use them in the article, which is fine, because kl.am is search engine friendly and does a 301 redirect for all links…so no link juice is lost ;)
@Steve – heh, about as hard as everything else! It really comes down to time and priorities. But we won’t integrate it into our Analytics until it’s been fully implemented. As you know, Google has been known to pull things back quickly and to not fully implement features they’re testing. So it’s a wait and see for now.
Patrick Altoft is actually incorrect–Google is actually NOT including ranking data via cd/ct. 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.
Those will be your actual ranking data, otherwise it’s ranking your one-line sitelinks instead.
This will be a great new advancement to help track results for our selves and our clients.
This change makes me happy–more info for webmasters is always a good thing.
dude there are too many SERP ranking tools out there…huh? dude just google it…yeah there are some paid services and there are some “free” services regardless the only rankings that count as far as CTR is concerned is Google Organic and not Google Local…
People just don’t click on Google local unless they’re looking for pizza and I don’t think searchers trust the weird map thing with all the letters on it UNLESS they are truly looking for something geo-specific.
eg., The closest smog checking place in San Diego, “smog check San Diego”, now that may be a relevant search result
I also like the sound of this, but I disagree that Google needs to still give out data on rankings when people “don’t” click. I think that method of measuring SEO performance was flawed from the start – for everyone – and the sooner the rank checkers are consigned to history, the sooner we can concentrate on quality over vanity.
Dixon.
I am with Dixon on this one. Rank checking can, and often does, become an unhealthy obsession.
I am really excited about this. It would be so much better to be able to report ranking on the keywords generating traffic directly from Google Analytics.
I have made some initial test on the new referring urls, and it looks promising to say the least. Check the link on my name to read more on the tests.
Hi, I’ve done some testing:
1. Cd variable only appears when a user is logged in to his Google account.
2.When a user is logged in he can personnalize a result page, this results in a change in the cd var.
… therefore it won’t change the way seo’s check for their rankings.
@referencement, thats the beauty of it all. If and when the new reffering urls are used on all referrals SEOs can report, to their clients, the average ranking on the keywords that actually drive traffic.
We will always need to check rankings manually for competitor and market analysis purposes though.
BTW: I am seeing the new referring urls, not only when users are logged on, but also on sitelinks, without being logged on.
Hi Jon,
You are absolutely with the points given. Presently Google more localized in providing results that global. often i search for some resources globally but i could get local data around 5 pages and then it goes as well..
Don’t expect that google will reveal all their secrets to the public. There is some info they would like you to know…but there are so many thing behind the scene.
You don’t know the half of it, people. Google’s API team is BRUTAL to work with and they will SUSPEND your key w/o warning while leaving someone else’s key in tact for doing the same thing. They won’t tell you any information. They will tell you, basically, to f*uck off.