Google announced today that they will now be automatically using the SSL version of their search engine for any user who is logged into their Google account.
Their official reasoning behind it is that it adds a new layer of security for those who rely on Google daily (read: everyone) as it is now much more difficult to sniff search queries on public wifi, via spyware, and any other attack vector.
Sure, that sounds pretty cool, thanks for doing that.
This is all fine and dandy, until you get to this part:
When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query.
Every single site owner and SEO on the planet should have had their ears (eyes?) perk up when they read that part.
It gets even better when you hit this gem:
If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.
What does this all mean? It means Google has just blocked referrer keyword data from organic results from ALL analytics platforms whenever a user is logged in to their Google account. However, if a user reaches you via an Adwords PPC ad, they’ll still pass along that referrer data to your preferred analytics platform.
Want to see how useful the data they give is? It’s already showing up in my analytics:
MAN THAT IS SO HELPFUL, THANKS GOOGLE
To say this is an abuse of power is quite an understatement. Google very well knows the search queries that sent users to you, seeing as how they are the ones who sent them in the first place. But in order to avoid anti-trust issues, rather than only allowing that data to show up in Google Analytics, they’re going to block it from all platforms instead. So in the effort of being fair, they’re screwing over everyone.
This just goes to show that Google is NOT on the publisher’s side. While publishers are the entire reason Google is in business (They’re the world’s largest scraper, their index is entirely full of other publisher’s content), Google has decided that unless you’re paying them to run your ads, you don’t deserve to know how people got to your site through their engine.
In reality, it will make analytics a slight bit less useful, but there will still be all the data coming from users who aren’t logged in to Google, which I would imagine makes up quite a few users in actuality. However, it’s still extremely inconvenient for those of us who look at our referrer data to determine which pages on our site we need to beef up with new internal links, content, images, or videos in order to increase their rankings even higher.
But you know who else it screws with? SEOs who are smart enough to use their analytics data to power their Adwords campaigns. For some stupid reason, most people treat SEO and PPC as mutually exclusive ideas that will cause the world to ignite if you were to combine them together. However, a smart website owner, ecommerce store owner, or affiliate marketer will build a site that performs well in the SERPs as well as on the Adwords PPC network, and they’ll use the data from PPC to optimize their sites and the data from their organic traffic to optimize their PPC campaigns. With this latest rollout of SSL, a schism will be formed between your organic traffic analytics and your PPC campaigns.
The Bottom Line: Google’s customers are ADVERTISERS, not website owners and publishers.
I’ve read about quite a few startup founders who started working as consultants or at web agencies where they cut their teeth and learned about development, project bidding, and project management. The problem is that: 1) Client work is a soul sucking endeavor that will leave most people hating their work after a few years and 2) it’s a black hole of quick money that will sometimes lock you in and prevent you from taking the bold steps to actually build a product and break free from the catch-22 that is having clients.
Below are my thoughts on the difference between Project Clients and Product Customers and why having a product is infinitely better in the long run.
When you work at an agency or as a freelancer or consultant, you have project clients. Project clients are people who come to you with their problem and it’s your job to fix it, or build it, or make it better. The reason they’re coming to you is because they don’t have the personnel or tools internally to complete the task, or don’t have the time or bandwidth internally to tackle the project themselves. (more…)
The bane of any startup founder’s existence is the emergence of competitors, or the discovery of competitors after dreaming up an amazing idea. It can certainly be discouraging to find out there are other people out there as brilliant and creative as you are, but there are many advantages to having competitors that most people never discuss. Here are a few of my favorite things about having competitors:
The big buzzword nowadays is “disruptive ideas”…projects and startups that flip a market on its head and make everyone see things in a totally different way. It’s extremely difficult to predict whether a disruptive idea will actually stick and take hold, and even harder to test such a belief. So this often leads to people believing in and launching projects and ideas into markets that literally don’t exist.
The Lean Startup movement is all about testing your niche or market thoroughly before actually committing time and money and effort into actually building things out. This is smart. The simplest, easiest way to test a market? Look for competitors. Look for companies that have done something similar to what you’ve had in mind, see how they’re doing it, how people like it, how much they charge. Dissect them. Then make them your bitch. (more…)
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