Lately the SEO world has been quite a revolution. It started long time ago but it was enhanced by last 2 weeks events when Raven announced that they stopped scraping search data but it continues up to this days until everyone is realizing the following fact:
Each day we will work more blindly in the SEO World
The reason is that Google is quite forcing Secure Socket Layer (SSL or https) so this is starting to appear as traffic keywords “Not provided” in Analytics. So what are the keywords that the user typed in Google get our site in the search results:
Only Google knows
The fact is that the (not provided) traffic will keep on growing. First, because any user that is logged with any Google device will send their encrypted searchs to the (not provided) list. And secondly, because Firefox and other navigators decided to encrypt all the searches done by Google, independently if you are logged into a Google account or not.
After the updates of 10th December in Google Chrome the browser will have the exact encryption as Firefox, hence that means that you will find a closed door when you search for keyword data in any web analytics tool.
To explain it in a simple way, that means that the (not provided) traffic source will keep on growing giving us less and less information about the search keywords that brought the users into our websites.
So what will the Search Engine Optimizations experts will do when they are forced to work almost blind ?
We will do what we’ve done through all obstacles in life: We will adapt and survive (Darwin said it very well)
There is an exception about this when the keywords are revealed: It’s when you use this keywords to do advertising in Google Adwords. Then they have to provide this information.
And there is much more in SEO than tracking search engine results. So if you are a fan of tracking all the keywords and doing all this little adjustments in your content and titles to bring more traffic I personally suggest one thing: Enjoy while it lasts because after this you will have to learn a whole new way to do it. And maybe focus more on original content or social engagement. Or maybe just combine it with SEM and make Google earn a few more bucks.
Google has been trying to tell it very clear long time ago saying “The ranking should not be used as a SEO metric” (Really ?) and now it seems that they are forcing their statement to be right. Because there is not other choice:
The first thing you have to know is that if you live from Google, your business depends on Google and if you don’t play with Google’s rules…you are going to be expulsed from the match.
Related posts that where an inspiration to write this one:
Google Chrome not provided
Fasani Corporation 
2 responses to “Here is the reason about why we will use Internet Explorer: Google keywords ‘not provided’”
Nice article, but I still can’t see why we will use IE… as a mistrustful non techie user I will prefer not to share my searching info to anyone, as a techie, my convictions will refuse to use IE as my default browser, an even if so changes in a far (very very far) future, it won’t be helpful about this problem: I want to know others search information, not my own.
Shed light to my doubt please, I still blind :P
Well basically AFAIK IE still does not force google searchs to be encrypted so it will still reveal what keywords you used to arrive to the website. It’s nothing important, just an ironic title since usually developers hated IE but now some people respects it.
Now try to do any search in Chrome navigation bar and you will see all searches are https. So what do you think they do this for ? Privacy of the user searches ? It’s only one of the reasons.