Google Turns its Back on SEO!

Yesterday Google turned its back on its core principle “Focus on the user and all else will follow”!

Google announced that it will now be encrypting search result URLs by default for all users.  Google will still compile SEO analytic data but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site if the user is signed into a Google service (Google Analytics, Google+1, Gmail).

Anytime a user visits your site from an organic Google search you will no longer have access to the query terms if they are signed into a Google account or service during the search.  Those organic results will be massed into a new keyword: “not provided”.  What does this mean to you?   If you use organic keywords to optimize your ranking on search engines, you have just lost some of your data stream.  Professional SEO managers rely on this information to justify ranking results.  However, you will continue to see aggregate query data and paid search data with no change.

Google has justified this change as a security fix.  While there are some session and cookie hijacking issues, there are other ways to repair the holes.  It is interesting to note that this is Google’s #1 security concern while Street View is photographing people’s streets, homes, and anything else that gets captured on film during a photo drive by.   Google claims this will only affect a small percentage of traffic, but that would really depend on the target audience.   Web sites that serve a tech saavy audience could have a much higher percentage of their SEO data aggregated into the unusable “not provided” group.  No there is more happening here.

Google is embracing protectionism and its bottom line!  With its “do no evil” principle Google has been regarded as the framework for internet search and marketing, but this is a move towards being just another vendor.  Encrypting the search results protects Google’s bread and butter  from third-party ad networks.   Let’s see how long it will take before Google encrypts all search results and monetizes it into a paid data sharing service?  I wonder how many SEO’s will don their black hats then?

Breaking news!  MC Hammer just announced he plans to launch his own search engine similar to Microsoft’s Bing.   Here’s an environment where we need more competition.  Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em!