Display Google Keywords that brought a user to the site

Question

I am looking to display something like:

Hello, you've reached this site by looking for [google keyword(s)]

I'm pretty sure I've seen this done before but I am having troubles figuring out how to grab the keywords that were used to lead a user to my site. Anyone know the answer?

Answer 1

You need to get the referring URL and then strip out everything for the "q" query string. This will give you the query that was used to get you to your page.

Answer 2

Using the referrer (http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol4/javascript_no14.htm) you can find where the user comes from. Then it's just a matter of parsing it correctly.

---

I saw this script :

function getkeywords() {
var x = document.referrer;
var lastparturl = 0;
if (x.search(/google/) != -1) {
lastparturl = x.indexOf("&btnG=Google+Search"); 
x = x.slice(38,lastparturl); 
x = x.concat("via google");
}
else if (x.search(/yahoo/) != -1) {
lastparturl = x.indexOf("&ei=UTF-8&iscqry=&fr=sfp"); 
x = x.slice(63,lastparturl); 
x = x.concat("via yahoo");
}
else if (x.search(/ask.com/) != -1) {
lastparturl = x.indexOf("&search=search&qsrc=0&o=0&l=dir"); 
x = x.slice(25,lastparturl); 
x = x.concat("via ask");
}
else if (x.search(/dogpile/) != -1) {
lastparturl = x.indexOf("/1/417/TopNavigation/Relevance/iq=true/zoom=off/_iceUrlFlag=7?_IceUrl=true"); 
x = x.slice(46,lastparturl); 
x = x.concat("via dogpile");
}
else if (x.search(/altavista/) != -1) {
lastparturl = x.indexOf("&kgs=1&kls=0"); 
x = x.slice(48,lastparturl); 
x = x.concat("via altavista");
}
else { 
x = "no keywords available";
} 
x = x.replace(/+/, " ");
return x; 
}

Here http://www.webmonkey.com/codelibrary/Get_Referrer_Keywords

I'm not sure if it works perfectly, but it worked OK when I reached their website through google.

I also saw that some scripts that you can download do that, for instance : http://webscripts.softpedia.com/script/Search-Engines/Keyword-Grabber-45299.html

Again, this will need to be tested.