Does google knows visitor referrals?

[emaccenti]

Hi all,

I'm curious to know. Is Google able to know what are the visitor referrals (where the visitor on my site is coming from), like we see in our stats?

[Zygoot]

Yes, Google can track this.

[GiveMeMore]

Do you have any doubt about that? Come on it is Google we're talking about :)
Google is like God, it knows everything

[mzanzig]

I'm not so sure about this. AFAIK the ad actually loads in an IFRAME. The call to the page that loads in the IFRAME seems to carry the referer of the page where the code is embedded. However, as the JavaScript code is on the page as well, it may be that it knows the original referer.

But I'm wondering, why do you want to hide the referer information from Google?

[FourDegreez]

The javascript is on the page itself, and creates the iframe. Notice no iframe tag in the adsense code. It definitely has access to the referer. It's been said that if the referer is a search URL, adsense will display ads related to the search terms contained therein. I haven't confirmed that, though. I'd also bet that Google uses this information in fraud detection.

[Goin]

I have found it many times that if the referring URL is a search engine, google shows ads relevant to that. But I was doubtful since nobody had commented about this before in our forum. Thanks for sharing the info.

[plasma]

It's been said that if the referer is a search URL, adsense will display ads related to the search terms contained therein. I haven't confirmed that

I can ACK that.
If visit my red and green widgets site manually, I see ads for red and green widgets.
If I searched for red widgets, I see only ads about red widgets.
Proof by example :)