Making search more secure…. and more difficult for businesses to optimise
Posted: Thursday 20 October, 2011
Keredy Andrews
Two days ago on its official blog, Google announced that when users are signed in to search they will find themselves redirected to a htpps:// site, which is an encrypted, secure service. It explains that this “is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a Wi-Fi hotspot in an Internet café”. To the average search engine user this might sound a really constructive move by the search leader but for businesses… uh oh - it means a huge amount of valuable information is just disappearing overnight. Not many people in the SEO world are a fan of Google the secure magician at the moment.
The data in Google Analytics will no longer include detailed information on how visitors have clicked through to a company’s website. One will know the referral is from Google but, specifically, there will be no information about the search query – that is, whether the user searched for a branded term, a current utilised keyword or a term that could be optimised for to a higher degree in the future. This is a bit of a slap in the face for businesses that take the time to optimise their sites as best they can for organic traffic, as webmasters or SEO managers will not be able to monitor which keywords are doing well and essentially give them the tools to amend their strategy. Even if a business knows there is a high amount of traffic for a keyword and they are lucky enough to be presented at the top of the results pages for it, that doesn’t mean the keyword is working well for the business; the granular data that businesses will no longer have access to helps one to understand what is really happening, with regards to bounce-rates and conversion. There are also wider implications for any business who takes its organic search rankings and wider online visibility very seriously. As SEO, PR and social media underpin each other, if businesses are unsure which of their current keywords are the most successful, this could affect whole marketing and communications plans the world over.
The full implications are not yet known; however, I suspect businesses will have to give greater time to analysing keyword traffic volumes and search engine result pages, whilst perhaps undertaking more page and content tests. This will, of course, only effect the statistics when a user is logged in but with Google+ gaining more and more momentum, it’s realistic to expect that higher numbers of searchers will have Google accounts and have no real reason to ever sign-out when searching – it’s just us SEO geeks that do that!
What is particularly galling to the SEO community is that Google is treating pay per click and organic SEO as two completely different situations… did I not mention this security change doesn’t affect PPC? When Google is accepting your money through paid results it will continue to give you the important search query information! The announcement seems to have caught most people by surprise and seeing as Google doesn’t pass on any personal information, the security story doesn’t stack up. Is it a revenue based decision, is it to hide data from its competitors or something else involving delivering the most relevant search results at the fastest speed? The latter hasn’t featured in any opinion that I have read so far and whatever its reasons, the G word is a bit of a dirty one at present and the encryption of searches has the potential to backfire.
