Has Google Gone All Voldemort on Our Asses? The SSL Debaucle

There was some major news this week from Google that have started making moves towards encrypting search results in an effort to perhaps dampen some of the bad PR they’ve had in recent times from collecting data via unsecured networks in Google owned street cars. However, this move which so far has just been implemented in Google.com, with some reports that it hasn’t been fully rolled out yet, has generated a malestorm  of controversy amongst SEOs and digital marketing professionals.

Many are arguing that this move makes it virtually impossible for Webmasters and SEOs to carry out their work effectively, as essential data will now be blocked out from Analytics making it a lot more difficult, if near impossible, to make improvements to optimise landing pages if they can’t see which keywords are referring their traffic to said pages. That being said, it’s worth pointing out this juncture that this data will still be available for Paid Search advertisers on Google Adwords. This has prompted many to speculate that this could be a move by Google just to push more people to spend money with their paid search advertising channels and thereby spend less time on their SEO efforts (which doesn’t bring any direct revenue for Google). Also it’s worth stating that this move has only been announced for Google.com and no mention of it will be rolled out to other locales.

However, if it is rolled out to other countries (and looks like the UK is getting this too) this could be one of the worst decisions ever made and proof that Google is not only hypocritical (no doubt Google targeted inline ads in Gmail will still continue) but also confirmation that Google has become the Voldemort of Silicon Valley. So I guess we have to make the most of the data we have available to us today and implement those postponed changes a bit sooner than we had initially planned, as tomorrow the data we’re so reliant on could easily be gone. Or just cough up the money and spend with Adwords as a last resort…

On a final note, it’s interesting to see some analysis from people in comparing the search strings of an SSL encrypted search with a normal search. The key is that the ‘q’ string with an SSL encypted search will not present any keyword and be blanked out, whereas in a normal search ‘q=keyword’. Perhaps the answer is to now look a bit closer to Bing and spend some more time getting more familiar with their analytics and tools for SEO.