Guess what? Google just pissed on the SEO community and tried to call it rain.
Again! -
Since Google’s announcement yesterday that they would now be encrypting search result URLs by default for all users, the community has been out for blood. The change is going to fix known privacy issues, so why is this a bad thing?
“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”.’
As of this morning, here’s what we see in Outspoken Media’s Organic Search Traffic report for the last 24 hours:
According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the change is only supposed to affect referral data in the single digit percents — only users who are signed into Google and searching.
That’s a pretty big assumption on Google’s part about my client’s users and referral sources. Remember, they’re AVERAGING based on the entirety of the Internet. In the case of Outspoken Media, yes, this “(not provided)” data does account for a small percent of traffic for that 24-hour period of time. To be exact, it accounts for 1.2% of our visits for that timeframe. But what about clients who have a stronger user base with Google accounts? We spoke with one such client yesterday and approximately 30% of their current users are signed up with Gmail accounts. That’s more than a single digit percentage and they already have a small amount of traffic!
The recommendations from both studies were immediate action on the part of Google to correct these issues:
“We argue that solutions should be quickly deployed to protect users against these two types of attacks. The session hijacking attack is harmful not only because it allows an attacker to collect a lot of private information, including sometimes the search history, but also because it can be exploited to add potentially compromising entries [25]. It can also be used to modify the search results displayed to the victim. In fact, Google allows to delete or promote—i.e., show as first—results using a button associated to them. An adversary hijacking a session cookie can perform searches on the victim’s behalf and influence the results corresponding to these searches as she wishes. For instance, this attack can be a powerful tool for censorship, as it can be used to remove or promote some pages displayed after a Google search.”
In each document were recommendations to both users and Google on how to counteract the threat of hijacking:
USER ACTIONS
- Log out from any Google service when performing a search
- Delete and disable the Web History service
- Disable personalization from anonymous cookies or always delete Google cookies
- Sign out from Google accounts when connecting from a shared network or to use a vpn to encrypt the traffic and prevent cookie interception.
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE By Rhea Drysdale is the Chief Executive Officer of Outspoken Media.
This is what Google is saying:
Making
search more secure: Accessing search query data in Google Analytics
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 | 11:17 AM
Labels: Announcements, googlenew
As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, particularly for
signed in users, we believe that protecting these personalized search results is
important. As part of that effort, today the Google Search team announced that
SSL Search on https://www.google.com will
become the default experience for signed in users on Google.com (see the Official
Google Blog post to learn more). Protecting user privacy is important to us,
and we want to take this opportunity to explain what the Google Analytics team
is doing to help you continue measuring your website effectively in light of
these changes.
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”.
What is Google Analytics
doing about it?
We are still measuring all SEO traffic. You will still be
able to see your conversion rates, segmentations, and more.
To help you
better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token
“(not provided)” within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will
continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in
user visits will be affected. Note that “cpc” paid search data is not
affected.
Our team continues to explore ways that we can surface relevant
information, like search query data, to help you measure the effectiveness of
your website and marketing efforts, and as always, we welcome any feedback or comments that you
have. Thank you for continuing to help us improve Google
Analytics.
Posted by Amy Chang, Google
Analytics team
Google announced that it is going to begin encrypting search queries with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) as the default experience at Google.com when you search logged into your Google account. http://www.google.com will become https://www.google.com.
“This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe,” says Google product manager Evelyn Kao.
There’s a chance that your Google experience will be slower with SSL because the computer your’e using has to establish a secure connection with Google. This is interesting, considering that Google has put so much effort into speeding things up.
It’s worth noting that you can just go to https://www.google.com when you’re signed out, and still use encrypted search.
Naturally, webmasters and SEOs are contemplating the effects this will have on search engine optimization and analytics.
Sites visited from Google’s organic listings will be able to tell that the traffic is coming from Google, but they won’t be able to receive info about each individual query. They will, however, receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to the site for each of the past 30 days in Webmaster Tools.
“This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic,” says Kao. “If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”
“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,” says Amy Chang on the Google Analytics blog. “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’.”
“We are still measuring all SEO traffic. You will still be able to see your conversion rates, segmentations, and more,” she adds. “To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token ‘not provided)’ within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that ‘cpc’ paid search data is not affected.”
Google is making the encrypted search available on all of its search properties except for Maps.
