“What Google Search’s SSL Change Means for Your Blog” plus 1 more

What Google Search’s SSL Change Means for Your Blog

Posted: 09 Nov 2011 12:07 PM PST

This guest post is by Oz of OzSoapbox.

Secure Sockets Layer (or SSL to you and me) is an encryption standard most of us are familiar with using whenever we do something over the Internet that needs enhanced security.

Image copyright Evgeniya Ponomareva - Fotolia.com

Whether it be banking, email, signing into a personal account, purchasing something, or any one of the dozens of things we do online daily with the potential to have our private data compromised, most Internet users are familiar with that little padlock symbol that appears every time we use SSL.

How SSL affects blog owners

In a recent update on their official search blog, Google has outlined plans to apply SSL to user search queries. Under the guise of privacy, Google claims that the addition of SSL will:

recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver.

Increased privacy is all very well, but what will that mean for your blog?

Previously an opt-in option, it’s important to note that Google’s implementation of SSL in performed searches at this stage will only affect logged in users. That is, people with a Google Account who are logged intot hat account while searching.

So what kind of affected traffic are we talking about here?

Google’s Matt Cuts (head of web spam) told Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief at Search Engine Land, that he “estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.”

Less than 10% of Google search users have a Google Account? I can’t help but seriously question that.

Between Gmail, iGoogle, YouTube, and more recently Google+ (over 40 million at last count and climbing), pretty much anyone who uses a Google product has an account and, more than likely, will be signed in. Is this SSL implementation really only going to affect less than 10% of internet searches?

Leaving that doubt aside for a second, let’s get back to the question at hand: again, what does all of this mean for your blog?

The one thing you, the problogger, needs to take away from all this is that if you’re tracking your users via keywords (that is, seeing which keywords bring in the most traffic), the accuracy of your stats is going to take a massive hit.

Once Google flip the switch on SSL searches, logged in Google Account users who wind up your site via Google will no longer be passing on any keyword referral information.

In an industry where even a few percentage points can result in massive changes to SEO campaigns and blog content strategies, losing up to 10% of your keyword referral data is huge!

And you don’t need me to tell you how important traffic monitoring tools like Google Analytics are in managing and analysing your blog.

What can you do?

As a blog owner, what can you do about these upcoming SSL changes?

Unfortunately for now, not much.

Google seem to have made a final decision on this and will implement SSL searches for logged in Google Accounts over the coming weeks. Interestingly enough, despite Google citing increased privacy reasons as the backbone of their decision, keyword referral data will still be available to advertisers.

It appears that while your privacy is seemingly important to Google, it’s not important enough to cut off your search queries from advertisers’ prying eyes.

As a blog owners, all we can do for now is sit back and take the hit. A monthly report (30 days) of the top search queries that brought traffic to your site will be made available via Google Webmaster tools, but it’s a far cry from the level of data analysis most blog owners are used to.

That’s even more of an issue when you consider there’s only so much you can do with WebMaster Tools when compared to proper traffic analysis tools like Google Analytics.

Looking at the long-term effects here, if SSL encryption doesn’t cause any hiccups for logged-in users, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before it’s implemented permanently for every search Google processes.

Google themselves are clearly hinting at this on their own blog;

We hope that today’s move to increase the privacy and security of your web searches is only the next step in a broader industry effort to employ SSL encryption more widely and effectively.

What appears to be shaping up is a future divide between the needs of blog owners and the financial relationship between advertisers and search engines. And we all know who’s going to win that battle.

As blog owners, do we have a right to demand keyword referral information from the visitors browsing our blogs? Or, as the value of this referral information is slowly quantified and sold to advertisers, is it only a matter of time before we too will have to start paying for the stats we need to run our blogs as best we can?

Updated daily, OzSoapbox is a blog cataloguing life in Taiwan, the good times and the bad. Interrupted only by social commentary on current events facing Taiwan, feel free to drop on by and join Oz on his journey through this beautiful island.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

What Google Search’s SSL Change Means for Your Blog

The Most Important Take-Home Advice from BlogWorld Expo LA [#BWELA]

Posted: 09 Nov 2011 06:04 AM PST

Yesterday I returned from a trip to the US to attend Blog World Expo. This year was my fourth BWE and as usual it was a great event—well worth the 14-hour commute each way!

Of course when I return home, everyone always asks, “What was the best thing” or “What did you learn this year?”

Here’s what I learned

The thing that I always learn when I go to Blog World (or almost any other conference, for that matter) is simple: DO IT!

This year I decided to take a different approach to taking notes at BWE. Whereas in the past I’ve tried to capture much more of the words and ideas of presenters, this year I decided only to write things down when I heard something I needed to implement.

So instead of page after page of notes to wade through, I ended up with a rather concise list of action items—things I knew would not only be nice ideas but which would help lift my blogs up a notch.

As I sat in LAX waiting to board my flight back to Melbourne, I gazed over the list of action items and realized that much of what I’d written were things that I already knew I should do, but were things that I’d either put off, been distracted from doing or had not yet done well.

Here’s the thing: blogging isn’t rocket science

While when you just start out, there’s certainly a learning curve and it can take a while to get your head around some of the more technical aspects of blogging, a lot of what it takes to build a blog is pretty much common sense (note: common sense doesn’t equate to it being easy … it’s also a lot of work).

However the problem with “common sense” is that things that are common sense are often the things we take for granted—they’re things that we get comfortable with, and don’t always actually do.

Not only that, but the common sense things are often overlooked in the pursuit of “secrets” or “advanced tips and techniques.”

I spoke with one blogger at BWE who told me that they were dissatisfied with the event because it was all too basic. They commented that they “knew it all” already and wanted speakers to reveal their “real secrets.”

When I unpacked this with him a little and we looked over his blog together, it became apparent that while he may have known a lot of what he’d heard at BWE already, he’d not done much of it. For example, he told me he was sick of people talking about setting up an email newsletter. However, when pressed, he admitted that doing it was still on his to-do list.

He knew he should do it, but he was so busy looking for the next new secret technique that he’d failed to implement one that was tested and proven.

What have you been putting off?

Of course, most of us have been overlooking or putting off something.

For me, there was a list of 20 or so things. For example, I sat in one session with Amy Porterfield who talked about Facebook, and I realized that while I’m using Facebook much more effectively than in the past, there are still five or six things that I need to do to take my Facebook strategies to the next level.

I also realized that I need to rework some key pages on my blogs, rethink some aspects of my blogs’ designs, and so on.

What about you? Most ProBlogger readers didn’t get to BWE this year, but that doesn’t stop you implementing what I learned. Take ten minutes to consider the action items do you have that perhaps you’ve been putting off, but which you really need to take action on.

If you’d like to share them in comments below to help make you a little more accountable to them, please do!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The Most Important Take-Home Advice from BlogWorld Expo LA [#BWELA]