It’s incredibly old news by now that Google has been withholding search terms from referrer headers. This was because SSL was being rolled out, and this meant that the resulting keyword report in Analytics wouldn’t show up for most visitors.
Moz knows all about that, as they admit that over 80% of their keywords for organic visitors are Not Provided. Of course, all of their paid traffic is coming through just fine in terms of keywords, if not a little expensive. I think we can all agree that that’s not exactly the greatest way to get your data.
Now, luckily this isn’t the only way to get your information, as you can use the Search Queries report in Webmaster Tools. Despite the usefulness of this tool, there seems to be information lost when you comepare it to what we used to have.
This is where the ved parameter comes in to help save they day. It seems that Google’s ved parameter has codes that contain useful information about the clicked link found in the search engine results. In a way, this helps replace what was taken away by Google when they took away the keyword data.
David Kelly wrote a great article on Moz and decided to share some information he has found with us that concerns the ved parameter and how it could help us.
To find out more, check out his column on Moz by clicking on the following link below: