Google has launched a secure encrypted version of its search facility, prompting concern about implications for internet marketing.

Anyone who has used a secure transaction website, such as a bank’s, will be familiar with the encryption symbol of a little padlock which appears in the address bar of internet explorer, which denoting that the information being sent is encrypted and therefore highly secure.

Now, by visiting https://google.com (notice https instead of http) your Google searches will be encrypted in the same manner, keeping them obscured from anybody who may try to snoop when you use an open WiFi network, for example.

Search Marketing

While this is attractive for privacy reasons, the implications for web analytics and search marketing are somewhat more serious. If users search using the Google SSL web search and click through to your site from the SERP, then it is unlikely their keyword data will be passed through to your web analytics, even if it’s Google Analytics.

There would be less data, specifically keyword data, available on how users came to your site. It wouldn’t be Google itself blocking this data; it would be due to the way browsers interact with referrals from sites that are secure in this way.

Search engine optimisation

Of course, this would seriously affect your ability to know how people reached your site through natural search, and would confuse search engine optimisation efforts and strategies.

To speculate on an extreme possibility, if Google made its SSL web search the default, analytics packages as a whole would no longer report keyword data, and search marketers would be left clueless as to what keywords users typed in, and which keywords led to conversions.

Google has not yet said what it plans to do about these implications for search engine optimisation and analytics, and the new SSL site is still in beta release due to its being much more resource intensive than http. In reality this means that SSL as default from Google would probably be a long way off, if at all. SSL capabilities are expected to be rolled out across other Google verticals however including Google Maps and images too.

Conspiracy theories so far include speculation that because Google itself will still have access to keywords, it could offer this information through Google Analytics in order to beat competitive analytics packages, something that Google has strongly denied, arguing that Google Analytics is on a level playing field with other packages as it receives no information when traffic arrives from HTTPS sites.

Whether Google wishes to harness a keyword monopoly against its rivals, or the new SSL site is the dawn of a new era in analytics remains to be seen, and is presently dependant on whether or not Google wishes to roll out its labour-intensive encryption options as defaults across all its platforms, or simply leave them as available options for privacy-conscious users.

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