Why do I see 'Not Provided' in my SEO agency report?

Since October 2011 Google has increasingly been hiding the actual terms used in organic searches. This has been done by Google as they “believe that protecting these personalized search results is important”.

http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html

However, Google has only hidden these terms for organic searches and is seemingly prepared to overlook this privacy issue for its paid-for marketing service AdWords (or as search engine specialist Danny Sullivan put it more bluntly, Google Has Put A Price on Privacy )

These hidden search terms are now reported in Google Analytics under a generic “Not Provided” category and the comparative size of this catch-all segment has been steadily increasing over time. In fact, aggregated industry figures now put this figure as high as around 80% for some sites, with a major increase seen in the 3rd quarter of 2013.
http://www.notprovidedcount.com/

Whilst there are some work-arounds to try to get some insight from this missing data, site owners have no real option but to ‘like it or lump it”, use the data they still have available for search engine optimisation and hope the figure doesn't get any higher in the future.

The signs that Google is killing the SEO industry

It's funny that the Internet search engine that really defined the work of search engine optimisation practitioners over the last decade is now giving several signs that it wants to kill that industry off.

1. The removal of organic results from the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
In a post a year ago, I commented on how little of the organic search engine results showed on the page of a normal user's screen for hotel-related searches. Back then I explained how very little actually appears above the 'page fold' on a decent size monitor and asked Google the question:

Are you trying to do away with the search engine optimisation industry entirely?

Well a year later the search giant has answered my question, by showing no organic results above the fold for certain search queries. E.g. "diabetes symptoms".

And with yesterday's announcement of 'Hummingbird' (the search giant's biggest change to their engine algorithm since the 2009 'Caffeine' overhaul), Google stated that  “around 90% of searches" would be affected. My initial take on this was "Great, I bet that means even more paid-for results appearing at the top of the page".

2. The removal of organic keyword information 
Unless you're in the SEO industry you might not have been following the recent developments in the ongoing [not provided] issue with Google.
To put this in a non-technical way... Google used to let's site owners see which words were driving organic search traffic to their site, via the Google Analytics tool they provide for free. However, over the course of a almost 2 years, the percentage of terms you get to see in GA has diminished to the point where now only 20 - 30% of the total are visible... and this is decreasing all the time.

Why? Well there has been various excuses for removing this incredibly valuable SEO source, from the generic "privacy" label through to the mention of "NSA snooping" (That's the National Security Agency, the internal spy organisation, similar in function to GCHQ, to us Brits).

However, despite all this bluster by the 'Big G' about protecting our privacy, Google still provides full disclosure about specific keyword usage to those who pay for it's AdWords Pay-Per-Click service. Thus putting a price on your privacy.

EU Privacy Directive - my recommendations

In my earlier post, I covered my understanding of the EU Privacy Directive and what the current situation was with this legislation in the UK.

At the end of this post I raised the question of what you can do. So here's some recommended steps you can take to compliance:

•  If you have an ecommerce site, immediately update your transaction Terms and Conditions.
• Carry out an audit of all 1^st and 3^rd Party cookies and other tracking technologies used across the sites. Then assess whether they are still required
• Clearly and accurately communicate to visitors about your cookie policy and what tracking is used.
• Develop a solution that requests consent if it is not already obtained. This consent needs to be obtained before any other actions are carried out on the site.   Note: Consent can only be gained by positive action (e.g. the user doing something. The user NOT doing something is not consent.
• Also check with your SEO company to see if any solution proposed affects your rankings (e.g. is seen as a blocker, cloaking, etc.?)

I would also strongly recommend that you speak with your legal representative or in-house counsel to ensure that you know your legal responsibilities when the legislation comes into force on the 26th May 2012.

EU Privacy Directive - Fact vs Fiction

There's been a lot of discussion in the last few months on the new EU Privacy legislation, so I thought I'd write-up my current understand of the situation.

The UK government has given websites until May 26th 2012 tocomply with the EU Privacy Directive. As of 26th May 2011 it has already becomelaw across a number of countries in the EU.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has the power tofine website owners up to £500,000 for serious breaches of the law. But he hasstated he will take a ‘practical and proportionate’ approach to enforcement ofthis legislation where organisations are making efforts to comply.

The Directive requires consent for storage or access toinformation stored on a subscriber or users terminal equipment. In other words…
obtaining consent for cookies and similar technologies. For example this could include: Local Shared Objects, commonly referred to as “Flash Cookies”, web beacons or bugs (including transparent or clear gifs).

The only valid exception is cookies which are ‘strictly necessary’ for a service requested by the user. However the ICO has stated thatwebsite analytics are not strictly necessary. They are also aware that obtaining consent from users may affect website owners’ ability to track users. In fact, when an opt-in message was placed on the ICO's own site, they saw visits (from opt-in users only) drop considerably. However, this will not stop them responding to complaints from visitors or carrying out their own investigations.

So what can you do?

(I'll hope to cover than in a subsequent post)

Underhand activity and negative PR

Sitting on the train this morning, I read the freebie newspaper (Metro) front page article about Facebook deleting a provision which said users could remove all their content at any time. These new terms meant that Facebook had rights to freely use anything people had uploaded to the website, even after members had deleted material or close their accounts.

However, in a dramatic U-Turn (shouldn't that be an 'about-face-book'?), Facebook has now reversed this action and reverted to its previous terms (read Mr Zuckerberg's blog article urgently posted last night).

The impact of both these actions is serious, not only as useful fuel for privacy campaigners such as the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), but also as an example of how to quickly create mistrust and affect your overall reputation in the online world.

As Zuckerberg is at pains to point out, Facebook now has 175 million members across the world "if it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world". However, its already clear that more and more people now believe Facebook to be less of the democracy it once made itself to be. And a reputation such as this is very hard to shrug off....