Google keyword data “not provided” in stats

Many of our web hosting users are using Google Analytics, Webalizer, and Awstats to monitor their website performs and statistics.  A few weeks ago Google made some changes to their services and made these stats slightly less useful.  Lately many website owners, Weberz included, have been seeing “(not provided)” or “Unknown” for the keyword visitors used to find their website in the Google search results.

The above screenshot from the Weberz’s Google Analytics shows that we had 28 visitors from Google organic search results, however now we have no way of knowing which phrase they typed in to find us. This makes it impossible to find out what keywords the users typed into the search results to find your site. Probably more important than that, it makes it impossible to figure out which important keywords or phrases your website might not be ranking for. 

What happened? Why the change?
A few weeks ago Google changed their services to providing secure, via SSL/HTTPs, search results to their users who are logged in to Google services. When making that change from non-secure to secure browsing for each results for those users, they also made the decision to remove this keyword data from the search results presumably to provide more privacy to those logged in users. Many website owners would argue that those users wouldn’t care about that data, or even know what it is, but Google is determined not to share the information.

So why did Google make this change? It comes down to two reasons.  The first is obvious, by adding secure browsing to search results Google can claim that they are providing a better, more secure, service to those users. They certainly are. The second reason is so Google can keep that data and only share it with businesses, and website owners, who participate in their advertising programs. That’s right, Google still shares this information with their advertisers. If Google really wants to be protecting their user’s privacy, they wouldn’t be sharing the information with their advertisers.. but that’s a different story for a different article.

So where do we go from here? How do we monitor this data?
As site owners we will need to figure out how to work around this problem to continue getting the information we need to make our sites better. To track whether or not our keywords and phrases are ranking well we’re going to have to go back to using tools that check the search results pages for links to our site.  Tools like SeoMoz Pro Tools and the SEO Book Rank Checker check the Google result pages to find out where you rank for keywords you provide.

Otherwise we will have to do exactly what Google suggests website owner do… Create and optimize our websites for visitors and let GoogleBot, Google’s search engine spider, rank us based on how good our site is. The idea is that if you optimize your site for visitors, and not GoogleBot, then you will provide a better user experience, higher conversion ratio, and more people will like and link to your site.  All of these should cause you to get better search engine rankings and result in more website traffic.

Conclusion
Mainly the purpose of this post is to inform our web hosting users of why they are seeing this lack of data in their stats programs now, however this change has caused quite the uproar among webmasters and SEO professionals. So I guess the real question of the day is.. Does it really matter that this data is missing?

Leave us a comment below and let us know what you think about Google taking away the keyword data!