I assume by now, you've all seen the news that Google has secured ALL searches leading to all their organic search query referrer data to go completely 100% not provided.
In fact, I checked this morning, and this site shows 93.4% of all Google organic search queries as being not provided. What about the other 6.6%? Maybe the SSL migration of Google is not 100% complete yet?
I guess Google felt, what the heck, 70% of search queries were not provided anyway, let's go all in! Screw online marketers. Screw webmasters. Screw SEOs. Take away their real search queries. Make them depend on getting that data from Google Webmaster Tools, which is far from a complete picture of your data.
I like how skibum at WebmasterWorld summed it up:
So lets see. Google launches analytics and gets many (most companies) to hand over critical business data for free that would not in a million years have been given out to the largest supplier of traffic/sales for most companies unless it was at gunpoint. They also own one of the biggest ad networks to help fill in where analytics may not provide them with a complete view.As a result Google knows more about (the online portion) of each individual business than the business owners probably do as well as the entire market in which said business operates.
Then Google takes away one of the best data sources for businesses to determine where their traffic and sales are coming from.
So now Google knows more about your business than you do and your insight into your business (as far as search traffic) is severely limited moving forward, though maybe a little less so if you hookup even more closely with this same company that claims to not be evil.
And now they've got you running around trying to get "bad links" removed that may actually be good in the sense that they send you business and/or leads. They may have other businesses taking up your time to remove links that you have to their sites as well.
Isn't there something seriously wrong with this picture? If nothing else, it should be apparent that there is no such thing as "free" and the more complacent businesses are about all this the more knowledge and control they will continue to lose over their businesses.
It is true.
How can they still give AdWords advertisers keyword data if they won't give it to organic search results. Heck, require us to use Google Analytics, just give us all the data. But no, Google Analytics isn't secure enough, only AdWords is? What?
Someone up there at Google needs to make a stand and either say we go all in, even with advertiser data or step back and don't do this with everything but advertiser data.
Google did send Danny Sullivan a statement:
We want to provide SSL protection to as many users as we can, in as many regions as we can — we added non-signed-in Chrome omnibox searches earlier this year, and more recently other users who aren’t signed in. We’re going to continue expanding our use of SSL in our services because we believe it’s a good thing for users….The motivation here is not to drive the ads side — it’s for our search users.
This should make every webmaster, marketer and SEO angry.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Threadwatch and Cre8asite.
