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Senior marketing officer - online at MyScience.co Ltd
19 October 2011 13:05pm
Anybody else seen this?
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html
I'd be interested in the communities thoughts on how this will affect SEO activity....
Web technology professional at Bitcala.com
19 October 2011 16:43pm
Hi John
Correct.
Making SSL the default for searches means that your site won't be sent the 'referrer' ID, so your analytics won't be able to extract the keywords that were used to search for your site.
The information about clicked links and keywords is still *within* Google of course, so they'll be able to tell you which AdWords (PPC) keywords are being clicked (of course, it's their business after all) - and Google Webmaster Tools will still give you an anonymised 'top 1000' list of popular searches.
Good for Google as it can only mean more AdWords sales.
This does however mean much greater privacy for end users, where even someone on the same network wouldn't be able to tell (by eavesdropping traffic) what you were searching for.
So, good for users' privacy, good for Google, not so good for webmasters.
-Will.
CEO at Econsultancy
21 October 2011 17:33pm
Hi John
We've covered the 'expert view' on this at http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8163-google-ssl-encryption-for-search-queries-the-experts-view