Upcoming changes in Google’s HTTP Referrer

Monday, March 19, 2012

Protecting users’ privacy is a priority for us and it’s helped drive
recent
changes.
Helping users save time is also very important; it’s explicitly mentioned as a part of
our philosophy.
Today, we’re happy to announce that Google Web Search will soon be using a
new proposal to
reduce latency when a user of Google’s SSL-search clicks on a search result with a modern browser
such as Chrome.

Starting in April, for browsers with the appropriate support, we will be using the “referrer” meta
tag to automatically simplify the
referring URL that
is sent by the browser when visiting a page linked from an organic search result. This results in
a faster time to result and more streamlined experience for the user.

What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? You may start to see
origin
referrers—Google’s home pages (see the
meta referrer specification
for further detail)—as a source of organic SSL search traffic. This change will only
affect the subset of SSL search referrers which already didn’t include the query terms. Non-HTTPS
referrals will continue to behave as they do today. Again, the primary motivation for this change
is to remove an unneeded redirect so that signed-in users reach their destination faster.

Website analytics programs can detect these organic search requests by detecting bare Google host
names using SSL (like “https://www.google.co.uk/”). Webmasters will continue see the same data in
Webmasters Tools
just as before, you’ll receive an aggregated list of the
top search queries
that drove traffic to their site.

We will continue to look into further improvements to how search query data is surfaced through
Webmaster Tools. If you have questions, feedback or suggestions, please let us know through the
Webmaster Tools Help Forum.

Posted by
John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst,
Switzerland