Woke up this morning to find SEOs on Facebook and Twitter up in arms about Google changing all queries and usage to the secure https://www.google.com settings which means that in Analytics, the keyword referral data from Google is all but kaput.
In essence, various sites are reporting that the [NOT PROVIDED] percentage of organic keyword referrals has jumped from 50-60% up to 95%, 99% or 100%. The changed seems to have happened over the evening, so sites are not able to pull full international statistics yet, but all signs point to SEOs and webmasters not being able to pull data on Google driven keyword traffic anymore.
Here are some thoughts from around Twitter:
Ironically, driving up [not provided] makes us more reliant on rank-tracking. Not really a positive move for us or Google, long-term.
— Dr. Peter J. Meyers (@dr_pete) September 23, 2013
Just checked major client traffic. “not provided” up from 45% yesterday to 70% today.
— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) September 23, 2013
(not provided) is hockeysticking. That’s not good – http://t.co/KPh2hawnyW
— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) September 20, 2013
Ew, I have a website with 90.67% “not provided”.
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) September 13, 2013
Of course, if you advertise in AdWords, this data is provided…
Here is a Facebook thread on the issue:
Please provide your thoughts and what you’re seeing in the thread or in the comments below.
We will be adding more to this news as the day goes on.
