Big rise in "Keyword not defined"

[GrumpyCarl]

Hi, all.

Anyone else seen a massive increase in the Not Provided keywords in their analytics in the past couple of weeks. Probably related to this (source:http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487) _In the past month, Google quietly made a change aimed at encrypting all search activity — except for clicks on ads. Google says this has been done to provide “extra protection” for searchers, and the company may be aiming to block NSA spying activity. _

Other than the unreliable stats from WMT, there doesn't seem too many ways which we can now find out what is sending traffic to our sites!

[LesleyPaone]

Apparently things have taken a change today look at this, http://www.notprovidedcount.com/  and this http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-gone-100-provided-secure-search/70799/

[Nightwing]

I think Google is on a covert mission to napalm the SEO industry....

[GrumpyCarl]

Scary how the 100% date, in the chart, has become this December. Was scary enough when it was 2017!!!

[GrumpyCarl]

I would agree, in part. However, even if you don't know which keyword is sending you traffic, If anything this makes ranking reports more important. If we see traffic going up, but cannot directly see which keyword is sending it, then one could draw a link (however tenuous) between the rise in rankings and the rise in traffic

[LesleyPaone]

It is, I do not guess there is any coming back from this either. It will be interesting to see how this changes SEO.

[DougRoberts]

Absolutely agree with you Grumpy Carl! I can see that this change is just going to increase the need to check rankings in order to find out which page is ranking.

Why we can't get this link in the google webmaster tools data I just don't know (but I know it's nothing to do with privacy!). I just want to know which pages the keywords are sending traffic to... grr

I just get a feeling that it's all going to get messy and I'm going to be spending a lot more time in front of spreadsheets.

[EGOL]

Google has turned into a black box.

[S.S.N]

anyone think Google is going to come up with a way to charge businesses/seo companies to view keyword data?

[MikeRoberts]

I hope Bing steps up their game and offers everyone a free analytics suite more on par with GA in response to the loss of keywords. I've never been enamored with Bing but they have been looking for a means to steal away people from Google. They can even market it as Microsoft saving the little guy/small business while Google hoards information.

[RedAntSolutions]

Can anyone confirm if this will have an impact on the traffic data showing in Moz? I'm assuming that the data is coming from the Google Analytics data and will therefore be affected in the same way?