Search goes secure, citing privacy issues
23 November 2011It is widely known that Google makes its money from paid advertising, yet the majority of users click on organic results. We all know this and accept that every tweak made to their search interface and algorithm is generally not for the benefit of the user but is designed to increase their income through driving more users to the paid listings. For example, Google ‘Suggest’ guides users to highly competitive short tail keywords which just happen to have higher CPC than their longer tail counterparts. Their organic algorithm in August 2010, known as the ‘Brand update’ which favoured brands was designed not entirely to benefit the organic results but to drive up paid CPCs by making it more difficult to gain page one rankings.
This time, Google has overstepped the mark and caused outrage amongst web analysts and SEOs by moving to secure (encrypted) search by default.
In mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out secure search and making it the default for signed in Google.com users.
By implementing encrypted search on Google.com for signed in users, search query data will not be passed to non-secure websites, which means your website analytics solution will not be able to record keyword referral data.
Google cares about privacy, unless it makes money out of you.
We care a great deal about web security and privacy and are all for a more secure web. Google cares too, but not if you’re an Adwords customer. In a Google blog post which announced the change, Google cited security and privacy as the reasons behind the move…
However, if this was indeed the reason, you would expect this to apply to all referral data, wouldn’t you? Well we certainly would, but not Google! This change only affects organic keyword referral data as Google is continuing to provide user’s ‘personal’ data to its AdWords advertisers.
Why do this?
The reasons behind this move are quite simple – at least from a cynical SEO’s point of view. Keyword data is useful as it allows us to see which keywords drive the most traffic and which are the highest converting. In essence, it allows us to focus our activity on the most beneficial keywords.
By blocking organic referral data and continuing to provide AdWords referral data, Google is trying to make it more attractive and increase usage of its AdWords platform.
It’s not all doom and gloom
Currently, it’s only signed in Google.com users that are getting encrypted search by default. This means that, at this time, there is little impact for the UK. In fact, for our UK clients, we are only seeing around one percent of queries affected. For some sites in the US however, this figure can be as high as 20%. With this change being rolled out slowly over a number of weeks, and the ever growing number of Google+ users, this figure will rise as more users are defaulted to secure search. Given that this only affects Google.com, the UK impact will remain small for the time being – although this could be a sign of what is to come for Google.co.uk.
Referral data for the top 1,000 keywords will be still available via Google Webmaster Tools, which can also be integrated into Google Analytics. This will provide an indication of top performing keywords but is no match for a complete view of organic referral data.
Just another hurdle
Whilst this is less than ideal from an organic search point of view, we don’t give in that easily. Google has thrown many hurdles at SEOs in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
We will just need to accept the change and move on, but with a small hope they may either backtrack or implement a solution to in order to pass organic referral data, as they surely cannot pursue a split rule when it comes to privacy and security for ever.
The good news is we have a wealth of data available to us to assist defining which keywords we should target, so there are no problems there. The main challenge that we are unable to overcome are the reporting issues that this will cause as no-one wants to see visit, conversion and revenue data attributed to the value (‘not provided’) which is the catch all value Google is applying when no keyword data is provided from the encrypted results.
A loss to everyone
Google is not just taking data away from Web Analysts and SEOs, they are taking valuable data away from all online and offline marketers. Luckily there are other data sources available such as AdWords keyword data and overall market keyword data, but nothing that matches accurate site analytics keyword data.
If you want to know more about SEO and how we can work with you to provide an integrated and future thinking approach to your SEO campaign, please get in touch.