Google’s controversial new announcement: Hiding keyword referral information

This week Google announced a controversial new initiative which prevents keyword data showing in Analytics Reports when someone is logged into their Google account.

Google has decided to encrypt their main site using SSL when people are logged in for “privacy reasons” so that people’s search queries can’t be intercepted by nasty hackers and also remain invisible in analytics reports.

The keyword report is incredibly useful to website owners and online marketers as it allows you to see what kinds of keywords people are typing into the Google search bar to find you. The report helps your SEO and your online sales if you know what to do with this data.

Many people in our industry have expressed their dismay and disappointment with Google’s decision, including SEOMoz CEO, Rand Fishkin, who explains what it means and how it will affect people in his recent SEOMoz “Whiteboard Friday” video.

Confusingly, Google has allowed AdWords keyword data to still show in Analytics, whether a person is logged in or not. So it seems that if you’re prepared to pay for AdWords, you’ll get all the keyword data which referred traffic to you.

I think that this in itself is really weird, as it directly contradicts Google’s stated reason for this move which is supposedly to protect users’ privacy.

There are lots of conspiracy theories going around why this has happened. It’s almost coincided with the announcement of Google’s new and very expensive enterprise level analytics package. Could Google be trying to squeeze out other Analytics products like Omniture and Webtrends in favour of its own product?

Maybe, but I doubt it.

Others think it’s to protect and maintainGoogle’s near monopoly over its Ad serving networks.

Personally, I reckon the whole thing (at this early stage) is a bit of a storm in a teacup, although it could get a lot worse in future.

Assessing our Google Accounts which have SEO rankings in the United States (where this has been rolled out first) the impact has been minimal at worst.

If you want to assess the impact in your Google Analytics Account just filter for “(not provided)” in your organic keyword report. The next screenshot shows how to do this if you’re interested, as well as the tiny impact SLL has had on blocking the keywords appearing in the report.

You can see above that just nine visits have been blocked from view since it was rolled out last week. It’s such a tiny percentage of the total report it’s hardly worth worrying about. In the United States, it’s a bit higher than that for many other website owners, but not enough to cause too much of a flap.

I think people are more reacting on principal than anything else.

Head of Google’s Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts reckons that less than 10% of searches are conducted when people are logged in so I don’t see the impact being majorly serious unless Google decides to fully encrypt their search engine for all users logged in or not.

If they do that, it’ll be on for young and old.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.