does google still post back the search term with the link click

i remember a while back when you could actually see what search result words were being used to link back to your pages using the data sent back from the google click. 

now when i test this i cant actually see the search results being sent back, so maybe they are being posted back with the link click. 

how can i test this

first i think find a search result that has a url in it that i can test. 

we can see that the link here is just the raw url, so lets dump the $_POST variable on this and see if anything hidden is being sent back.

adding the post back dump, to see if anything is sent back on that post, this will show all items sent back by the server with the click, im not sure if they post back or just link. 

so from the test it seems they dont send anything back, but this is running from another iframe of the code, so maybe the post data is not passed onto the iframe.

so to test i will add the var dump on post to all pages and see if anything comes up

nope even on the main view page it returns no data, so i guess you can no longer see what keywords were searched for when getting incoming requests from google using this method anyway.

actually i just had another idea to check, which is what was the referring url, and then that might have the keywords. lets extract the referring link. 

ok so i think we can use this

test this 

PHP

echo $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];

so that does give something, but not the search text, looks like they have thought of that as well. they must clear their referrer headers before forwarding the traffic.

so all we can collect from this is the refurring url's rather than the actual search term, i might create a quick database for this and see what overall url's are coming in even though it might just end up being spam. I guess you could still create a tool that had general incoming referring url's for your pages from this data.