Google SSL Search Encryption Rolls Out….

Several months ago Google made some changes to the default search experience on google.com – when you are signed into a Google account they added SSL encryption to increase the security and privacy of your searches.

Yesterday, on insidesearch.blogspot.com they announced that they would be expanding this to all their local domains around the world and it should be a few weeks for it to be fully introduced.

What this means as a searcher

If you are signed into a Google account (Gmail, Youtube etc) and are performing searches on Google, you will automatically be redirected to https://www.google.com (https://www.google.com.au in Australia) where your searches are encrypted.

Normally when you do a search on Google and click on a link to a website in the organic listings, that website collects data about the keywords that were used in your search. With encrypted search this keyword data is no longer passed on so the website will only know that this visit originated from Google but not which search queries were used.
From a user point of view this seems like a good move, it increases the security of the search and helps protect your search privacy from third parties.

If you’re running a website

Site owners will not get all the keyword level data they would normally get. When people who are signed into a Google account do a search through https://www.google.com.au the keywords are not going to be passed along to their analytics software. Instead of getting the keyword data, all encrypted searches will come under the heading “not provided” in the keyword list (see below).

It’s hard to tell exactly how this is going to effect SEO strategies until we know what percentage of people are signed in when searching but it shouldn’t take much longer than a month or two until we do know.
With Google pushing Google+, Android and all its other projects, we may see an increasing number of people needing to log in to use certain services in the future.

Running an AdWords campaign?

You don’t need to worry for now. Google will still be sending an unencrypted referrer that includes the query used from AdWords visits so you are able to improve the relevancy of your ad campaigns and boost performance.

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