On the 18th, Google said it was going to start hiding the keywords utilized by people logged into google accounts (Gmail, YouTube, Google+, etc.). Interestingly, in the name of privacy, Google is only going to do this with its organic search results. In my opinion, that’s B.S. and this seems like quite an evil move in my book. As much time as Google spends educating the search industry on how to better present its content and get it ranked for keywords, hiding organic data like this seems pretty despicable.
If they had chosen to hide them for paid search as well as placement of paid search ads, I might agree. Is Google hiding keywords utilized between its own properties? Well, no… those are their properties so it doesn’t count. It’s simply hiding them from anyone else that matters. The infographic below from Attachmedia, describes the pros and cons of the move.
One note on this. Google expects that this will impact about 10% of your analytics keyword results. And it appears that they are still enabling usage of keywords within Google Webmasters… for now.
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Damn, then what can we do as a SEO consultant when we have no data !
Good question, Myindustry! For now, you can continue to rely on Webmasters… but being able to connect the dots between a precise keyword and the conversion isn’t possible… only a probability assigned. Or utilize the subset of visitors who are not logged in.
@myindustry:disqus
You can still use a program like seomoz to get some of this data and possibly Alexa.
Oh wow! This really sucks. I was wondering why I had more keywords not provided for my organic searches in analytics. This is definitely counter productive. I really like the diagram created it helps people understand this much better!
Cheers!