A day that I’ve talked about for some while, hoped would never come, but feared eventually would, apparently has seemingly arrived. It appears that Google has started to cut off keyword data altogether.
Back in October 2011 Google made a massive change switch to secure search that since then has resulted in a steady rise in "(not provided)" data. What we mean by this is that when you search in Google, the URL is https://www.google.co.uk i.e. Google is running in secure mode.
The big problem is that this means that no more keyword data will be passed to site owners.
The graph below shows the steady rise over time of how Google has gradually increased the moved to encrypted searches using https://.
The percentage of search terms as “not provided” has increased as Google has rolled out changes.
The two extremes of this graph are as follows :-
- 137 visits out of 12,810 visits in January 2012 – just 1%
- 9,998 visits out of 23,472 visits in August 2013 – now 43%
Mozilla’s Firefox (July 2012), Apple’s Safari browser in iOS 6 (September 2012) and Google’s own Chrome browser (January 2013) have used encrypted search, even when people aren’t signed in at Google.
This is how it shows up in Google Analytics in case you’ve never seen it or understood what it means.
What does this change to secure search mean to my law firm?
Depending on when the changes actually reaches the UK (it can take some time) you can expect to see a steady increase in the percentage of searches being secure.
You will need to start looking at alternative tools to check on likely search keywords e.g. WordTracker. You will also need to make sure that your Google Webmaster Tools account is correctly configured as keywords do show up here, but only 90 days worth of data.
One thing we will be investigating is whether running your website fully under https:// as well will make any difference. We don’t think it will, but we may well experiment with this. The problem with this is that it does put a “performance overhead” on the server requirements for websites being run in this way.
For another view on this, have a watch of Rand Fishkin's Whiteboad Tuedsay video on the same topic. This guy is the CEO/Founder of Moz.com which is a site we use to aid our SEO projects for clients, so he REALLY knows what he's on about.
So why have Google made the change to secure search?
Some believe that Google have done this to increase the number of Adwords advertisers as searches coming from Adwords are not tracked using secure mode. There are in fact three ways that Google still allows search keywords to be discovered.
- Search terms that get suggested by Google Instant autocomplete
- Search terms that Google provides to publishers through its Google Webmaster Central service
- Search terms that Google continues to transmit across the open web to its advertisers
Consider the following statement recently given by Google to one SEO community website :-
We want to provide SSL protection to as many users as we can, in as many regions as we can — we added non-signed-in Chrome omnibox searches earlier this year, and more recently other users who aren’t signed in. We’re going to continue expanding our use of SSL in our services because we believe it’s a good thing for users….
The motivation here is not to drive the ads side — it’s for our search users.
The other theory is that this is a reaction to Google being accused of helping the USA’s National Security Agency spying program PRISM back in June.
Bearing in mind Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, yet in the past was caught capturing people’s data via it’s StreetView cars, for which it looks like it will be fined billions of dollars.
Which version do you believe?