You may have heard today about an announcement that Google has made regarding SSL in their searches which has left SEO's wiping beads of sweat from their foreheads. I must admit, my computer nearly fell off its desk when I opened Google's SSL announcement blog this morning. What? Why? How? Were just some of the questions that raced through my head as my eyes scanned the screen.
So, what is it all about? Well, in the words of SEO royalty, Tom Critchlow on Twitter, this could be the "biggest SEO news of the last 24 months..." That is a big statement, but it could certainly turn out to be true. Essentially, the changes that Google have announced today mean that when a person is logged into a Google property (that is newspeak for Gmail or Google + or any other Google product) their Google.com searches will be encrypted (written in unreadable code) so that your Google Analytics account wont be able to tell which keyword they came from.
There are a few points to make at this stage. The first is that the amount of people logged into Google in the way described above means that this change will affect only a very small percentage of searches, as Anna from Koozai explains, this could be as small as 1 or 2 percent. This leads to my next point, that the majority of your organic traffic will still show keyword data.
Rather interestingly, Google has decided that searches that come from clicks on AdWords ads, regardless of the user being logged in or not will not be affected, meaning that you can always access keyword data from your PPC efforts. The cynic in me says that this is typical; another reason to pay Google for data (they've got you right where they want you). My cynicism aside, it does make sense to say that AdWords advertisers do indeed need keyword data at all times.
So, how will this affect you? Essentially, you will now have less data on which keywords people use to get to your website. From a webmaster / SEO point of view this news is thoroughly rubbish. From a searcher point of view, I suppose it means that I keep slightly more privacy, although personally I think people should feel a lot more threatened by the privacy issues that joining Google + presents, as opposed to the keywords they use to find mechanics and TV sets, but that's a conversation for another day.
Although this is set to affect only a small percentage of searches at the moment, I would caution that this percentage is set to rise. With Google pushing their social network, Google +, heavily and people being decidedly weak at resisting I would say that many more people will be 'logged in' quite soon. That means less keywords, which means less data, which means I am less happy.
This, of course, is not the be all and end all but rather the beginning of the end of something that I quite liked. It means that you should now go and get accustomed to reporting without relying on keyword data; it might still be there, but I wouldn't rest my mortgage on it. It will be interesting to see what Analytics experts like Avinash Kaushik have to say, I will be keeping an eye on his blog for you!
Picture courtesy of Umbrovskis.com on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence!
