It was interesting to see the first quarter revenue announcement that Google published yesterday. Thankfully the analysts seem to see the 3% decrease, from $5.7 billion reported in Q4 of 2008 to $5.51 billion in Q1 of 2009, as slightly better than  expected. Ok, not that interesting but a good indication that the world’s situation might not be quite as bad as all that.

Of real interest, to us Search Marketers anyway, are Google’s announcements on the new referring URL format and one line sitelinks.

The latter is about improvements to sitelinks and Webmaster Tools. I’ve not been able to replicate what Google are showing me in their blog images in the SERPs but that’s probably because it’s yet to be rolled out in Google.com.au. Apparently the previous two columns of sitelinks which would appear under the first search result are being replaced with a line of up to four sitelinks on “multiple” (not all?) search results. Seems fairer to the rest of the results and will certainly be of more use to searchers!

The former is all about the addition of new strings to referring URLs for visitors coming from Google’s search result pages. The old /search? string is being replaced with /url? but “will initially only occur in a small percentage of searches … as this is gradually rolled out”. There’s observation in other search blogs that the addition of the &cd= part of the new string matches up with SERP rankings. Brett Crosby, Sr. Manager at Google Analytics, tells us “the goal was to allow new tests of search without making it difficult for analytics products to report on query data.” Matt Cutts has commented “this is awesome for webmasters – even more information than you could glean from the previous referrer string”. Too much excitement … time for lunch