Chris Sandberg » Google

Tracking Google Ranking Position From Parameter in Refferal URL

csandb — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:15:14 +0000

Over the last several months I’ve become somewhat obsessed with collecting SEO related data in an automated fashion. I’ve taught myself some PHP to accomplish what I want to achieve, and am actively working on several scripts that will gather and analyze all kinds of data. One things I wanted to do was track over time the change in rankings for keywords I was already receiving traffic for so I could measure what effect a change in SERP rank position would have on the amount of traffic I received for that keyword, and get a better idea as a whole what effect ranking positions have on traffic levels. I wanted to go beyond just regular rank checkers like SEO Book’s RankChecker and make the process entirely automated. My plan was that when a visitor came to one of my sites from a search engine a script would automatically execute that would check the rank position of my website for the keyword they used to come to my site, or at least add the keyword to a queue. I assumed that I would have to scrape this information from Google because I knew they didn’t offer an API anymore and from my initial research I couldn’t find the information in the referral URL from Google.

I was very excited to find out, however, that Google actually started to pass along this information in their referral URL parameters a little over a year ago. The URL format they said they would start using in their post announcing the change looks like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

so each of the URL parameters are:

sa=t
source=web
ct=res
cd=7
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN
rct=j
q=flowers
usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w
sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The “cd” parameter is the one that shows the rank position of the link the visitor used to get to your site.

This information is very useful not only because it saves time in having to check rankings yourself, but it actually tells you the exact position that the given visitor saw. One drawback to rank checkers or just manually checking a rank is that you can never be completely sure if the rank you get reported back is what actual visitors to your site experienced because different data centers could be presenting different results and with Google personalized search any given searcher’s SERPs could look different as well. So not only is the process simplified by getting this piece of information from the refferer URL, but the data you are getting is much more accurate than from scraping or manually checking.

Alas, it appears that Google doesn’t provide this information for every visitor. Shortly after Google’s post on the subject Omniture reported that this data was only shown for US searches and was currently impacting only about 10% of all searches. I think now, a year later, Google may be showing it more often but from my experience it is still a minority of searches.

Once I start to look closer to the data I’m receiving I’ll be posting more exact numbers on this along with other interesting data I’ve been collecting.

Google’s New Acquisition: Jaiku

csandb — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:05:49 +0000

Google’s latest acquisition is the popular twitter-like site Jaiku. I am a user of both Twitter and Jaiku and have enjoyed participating on both sites. Although Twitter has been the most popular micro-blogging site, this news from Google may eventually change that, or at least bring greater growth to Jaiku and put it in the limelight for the moment. I thought the following quote from the Google Blog regarding the acquisition was pretty interesting…

Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it’s more difficult to keep track of everyone when they’re running around at warp speed. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired Jaiku, a company that’s been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most — regardless of whether you’re at a computer or on a mobile phone.

Micro-blogging helps us make up for that loss of contact and communication we may experience due to technology making our lives more fast paced. In a way it helps us better keep tabs on what all our family, friends, and contacts are up to, but since it is voluntary and permission based only people who want to share will be tracked, so there is no invasion of privacy. Helping us better stay connected is why Google has acquired Jaiku. Personally, I think they could go a whole giant step further in that goal if they were to acquire Facebook also.

Feedburner’s Premium Services Now Free

csandb — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 10:42:12 +0000

Via Pronet Advertising I found out that Google is now offering Feedburner’s premium services, MyBrand and Stats PRO, for free. This is great news for all Feedburner users, including myself. I guess this was to be expected since Google has become so successful by offering so many great services in the past for free.

What I Read

csandb — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:33:35 +0000

I love Google Reader’s trends feature, which allows you to see statistics about your reading habits. Here is a list of the top 20 blogs I have been reading over the past 30 days. The numbers are the total amount of posts I read and the percentage of all posts I read.

John Chow dot Com 35 33%

Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim – Internet Marketing Blog & Consultant 26 13%

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog 19 41%

SEO Book.com 19 32%

Pronet Advertising 18 32%

ProBlogger Blog Tips 17 23%

Chris Knudsen on life, business, and entrepreneurship 9 47%

The Jason Calacanis Weblog 9 20%

Shoemoney – Skills to pay the bills 9 14%

Russell Page 8 40%

Copyblogger 8 38%

Seth’s Blog 8 17%

Smooth Harold | The Blog of Blake Snow 7 37%

NewspaperGrl 7 35%

Graywolf’s SEO Blog 7 25%

Online Marketing Blog 7 18%

Macalua.com 6 43%

Tropical SEO 6 40%

SEO BlackHat: Black Hat SEO Blog 5 83%

Connor’s Conundrums 5 26%

The Efficiency of RSS Technology

csandb — Fri, 25 May 2007 11:01:01 +0000

I love RSS technology because it empowers its users to consume content in a much more efficient manner. Instead of having to go to each individual one of our favorite websites or blogs to see any new content, and run the risk of wasting our time if there is no knew content, we can be notified of any new updates and consume it all in one place. To celebrate the power of feeds I have created this little video of of a typical day of going through my feed reader condensed into 30 seconds. The actual time I spent reading this content was a little over 20 minutes. I hope you like it.

My Google Reader Feeds

csandb — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 08:11:42 +0000

A couple months ago I noticed that I had subscribed to almost 200 feeds on bloglines. Although they were all good blogs I realized that I had been avoiding checking up on them simply because it seemed a bit daunting to login to bloglines and see that I had hundreds of unread items. As a result of my reluctance to check my bloglines account on a consistent basis I was missing a lot of good posts, so I decided that I would narrow down my choice of subscriptions to maybe only 20-30 blogs that I really felt were the most important. At the same time I decided I would also like to try out a new feed reader to see if they offered better features than bloglines.

A few weeks ago I heard from Paul Allen that Google Reader tracked your reading habits and would generate reports of what you have been reading over time. I thought this was a cool feature that may help me prioritize which blogs I should stay subscribed to and which blogs I should drop in case my list got too big again. So I left bloglines and have been using Google Reader ever since. I decided I wanted to start off from scratch and only initially subscribe to the blogs that I could think of off the top of my head. Over the last few weeks I added a few more, but have still managed to keep the list down to a size where I could reasonably read every post if I wanted to (usually I just a select a few that seem the most interesting) even if I have been gone for a few days. I wanted to share my list of the blogs I have decided to subscribe to. Don’t feel bad if your blog is not on the list, it may have been on my old bloglines list, and may show up in the future on my new Google reader list (Google reader seems to help me organize my feeds a lot better than bloglines so I may be subscribing to a lot more feeds in the future). Here is the current list:

In a few weeks once I have collected more data on my reading habits I will posting a ranked list of the blogs I read the most.

Death of the Google Bomb

csandb — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 03:59:02 +0000

This is probably old news to those of you that keep up on search related news, but I thought it was worth mentioning for those who haven’t heard yet. Google has finally made an algorithm change that has essentially killed the Google Bomb. For those who don’t know, Google Bombing is a tactic used to get a certain page ranked for given keyword in Google by linking to that page with several links with the anchor text being that of the desired keyword. Some examples of Google Bombs are listed here. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land goes into more detail on Google Bombs and the algorithm change.

Internet Headlines of 2007

csandb — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 06:54:10 +0000

What lies ahead in the Internet World in 2007? Below are my three predictions of Headlines we will see during the coming year along with my justification for such predictions.

Google Buys Digg for $200 Million
Despite much criticism recently, Digg continues to grow. Google does not currently own a site like Digg, so Digg would fit nicely into their portfolio. Digg doesn’t receive quite the amount of traffic as YouTube, which Google paid $1.65 billion for earlier this year, so it doesn’t merit such a large price tag, but I think that within the next year Google will be willing to pay at least as much as Digg is asking for.

Wikipedia article count reaches 6 million
With a count currently just above 4 million and growing steadily, Wikipedia’s article count should reach 6 million by years end.

Firefox Surpasses Internet Explorer’s Market Share
Okay, I don’t really think this will happen especially considering IE will be the default browser on many computers which will operate on Microsoft’s new Windows Vista, but I think it would be cool. Even though it is not likely, it is possible. The browser wars in 2007 will be interesting either way.

The Death of Adsense Blog Post

csandb — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 10:12:50 +0000

In my last post I blogged about a new report out called The Death of Adsense. I anticipated that it would become fairly popular so I set out to get my blog post ranked in Google for the term “The Death of Adsense” and added an affiliate link to the post so that I would have some incentive to get my post to rank high. I was pleasantly suprised to see that a week after I blogged about the report my blog post was in the top ten in Google for the terms “The Death of Adsense”, “Death of Adsense”, and “Adsense Dead” for which I currently rank 3rd, 2nd, and 1st respectively. I have been getting quite a bit of traffic from the ranking and have gotten several referals because of it. It’s too bad I only got $0.50 per referral. However, it was kind of fun to be able to just say “I want to rank high for this” and then just go out and do it. Sorry, if it sounds like I am bragging too much.

Anyway, In the follow up to The Death of Adsense entitled Life After Adsense, Scott Boulch reveals his system for making money without Adsense, Click Flipping, where one simply signs up for affiliate programs and send traffic through optimized Adwords campaigns. The key to making money doing this to track each individual keywords conversion and only run with keywords that are turning a profit.

The Death of Adsense

csandb — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:48:19 +0000

Is Adsense dead? I just read a free report called The Death of Adsense. The author explains why adsense is no longer as big of a money maker as it used to be. He then goes on to give some background information about himself to show why he is an authority on the subject and why you should listen to him.The author is going to come out with a second eBook later this month that explains how you can make a lot of money from your internet traffic without Adsense. He claims he knows a way to sell clicks for $5, $10 or even more. If you are interested check out the site to learn more.