keepCalm

Blog post originally published on September, 27th 2013.

 

Update on September 3, 2018:
A few years back, the proliferation of “not provided” keywords had a major impact on the relevance of keyword reports available in web analytics tools (read on below). It’s now the Google Search Console’s turn to undergo some seriously detrimental limitations to data reliability.
Google laconically explains that (for reasons related to privacy, but without further explanation) its results no longer include long tail queries when a query filter is applied. The consequence? A huge chunk of traffic is lost in reports. And let’s not forget that for many sites, long tail queries can represent 50% of traffic… Find more details here.

Remember, we each have the choice to use different search tools, whether they (truly) respect privacy like Qwant, or protect the forest (seriously!) like Ecosia.

 

Original post
The time has come! Google’s ‘not provided’ is set to reach 100%… Google cites data security reasons, but no-one is naive enough not to see the American giant’s wish of imposing its fee-paying advertising model. We have already published several different articles on the subject. Over the last few days, many professionals from the SEO sector (Abondance, Web Rank Info, Search Engine Land) have also assessed the damage.

An unlevel playing field means that humour and derision remain the only weapons… Here are some small creations as a sort of survival kit, to bring the smile back on your face (despite everything), whilst trying condemn a very difficult situation at the same time… It is very unlikely that this will change anything, but at least we will have tried.

The films which inspired us:

Full-metal-racket
The-ranking-dead
Goodbye-SEO
Few-More-dollars
Silence-of-SEO
Adwords-Now

We could have continued like this for ages, but our job is Analytics. Other famous titles also sprung to mind:

  • Gone with the ‘not provided’
  • The day after SEO
  • Billion dollar Baby
  • (Don’t be) The Evil dead
  • Keywords: without a trace
  • Kill Bill (& SEO)


Or with other self-explanatory titles:

  • Into the Wild
  • The Dark Knight rises
  • There will be blood
  • Dial M for Murder
  • The Hustler
  • The Intouchables
  • Lost

And the “Keep calm” series:

keepCalm
keep-calm-and-pay-for-clicks
keep-calm-and-start-adwords
keep-calm-and-love-prism-decale

Your suggestions and graphic designer talents are welcome. And well, if this doesn’t make Google budge, it will have made us laugh at least…

Latest! It seems that Bing is also about to encrypt its keywords, meaning that an alternative to Google is likely to disappear… To be continued, but in the meantime, keep calm!

keep-calm-and-go-to-bing6
Author

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7 Comments

  1. Pingback: Google ‘(Not Provided)’ Keywords: 10 Ways to Get Organic Search Data – newcreationrecords.com

  2. Pingback: Google ‘(Not Provided)’ Keywords: 10 Ways to Get Organic Search Data

  3. IT Reseller tool

    LOL this is fun… and unfortunatelly right.
    Keywords have also desappeared from Google Webmaster Tools! 🙁

    Where are we going?

  4. Pingback: Google ‘(Not Provided)’ Keywords: 10 Ways to Get Organic Search Data Fanpages para Facebook

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  6. Google algorithm has always been a twisted logic for internet marketers.

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