What are your thoughts on Google's recent 100% not provided move?

Last week Google moves to secure search as a default for everyone, making website owners and webmasters unable to see search term information previously offered through the keyword referrer system.

According to Danny Sullivan of Marketing Land the change makes it very likely that in the near future, publishers will receive no search term data sent to them directly through the decades-old and industry-standard “referrer” system. The withholding of this data means terms flagged as “Not Provided” within Google Analytics already should have spiked for many sites and has nothing preventing it from reaching 100%.

Terms can still be viewed within Google Webmaster Center, but only the top 2,000 terms per day and only going back for 90 days.

As before, clicks on advertising links remain unsecure and open to potential eavesdropping, and advertisers continue to receive the terms directly through the referral system.

What are your thoughts on Google's recent 100% not provided move?

Latest update on Google search algorithm: hummingbird

At a special event in the garage where Google was born, the company announced that a handful of new updates to the search offering  including a major update to Google's search algorithm that the company calls "Hummingbird." The new algorithm will affects 90% of all searches, and has been in place for about a month, said Amit Singhal, senior VP at Google.

This new update from Google will give better results to the increasingly complex questions posed by people who uses Google search. The changes could have a major impact on traffic to websites. Hummingbird represents the most dramatic alteration to Google's search engine since it revised the way it indexes websites three years ago as part of a redesign called "Caffeine".

Google's renovations to its search engine haven't triggered widespread complaints from other websites yet, suggesting that the revisions haven't resulted in a radical reshuffling in how websites rank in the recommendations. The Caffeine update spurred a loud outcry because it explicitly sought to weed out websites that tried to trick Google's search engine into believing their content was related to common search requests. After Caffeine kicked in, hundreds of websites that consistently won a coveted spot near the top of Google's search results had been relegated to the back pages or exiled completely.

Latest buzz in SEO: Google moves to secure search as a default for everyone

During the first three quarters of 2013 we have noticed that there is an increase in the numbers of visits coming from keywords not provided in Google analytics. What exactly is keyword not provided? When a search is made on a secure Google webpage and the result clicked, the search term would no longer be passed to the destination website. Instead, these visits would simply be grouped together in Google Analytics under the keyword "not provided".

Why Google has shifted on encryption for people who aren’t even signed-in?

According to Google they added SSL encryption in their signed-in search users in 2011, as well as searches from the Chrome omnibox earlier this year. They are now working to bring this extra protection to more users who are not signed in because they believe that some people don’t yet fully understand how SSL search works.

What would be the impact of this change to your SEO campaign?

Anything that Google does will have a great impact in your SEO campaign due to the fact that Google controls almost 80% of the search engine market distribution worldwide. Having a secure search in Google will make the SEO experts guessing on the keyword performance of their natural search campaign in Google. Even if they can still see some data coming from other search engine like Yahoo, Bing and other search engines, these data are still not enough to fully understand on which keywords that will provide with the most number of visits and conversions due to the fact that Google is more dominant compare to all other search engines combined.

Whether we like it or not SEO experts should adapt to this new change in Google search and try to think of ways in order to identify which keywords will provide better conversions in Google search results.