Comments on: Why Traffic Stats Are Screwed Up: Google’s “Not Provided” Search Data

By: Tony Payne

Tony Payne — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 08:37:37 +0000

Seeing exactly the same on my lenses too. The only good thing is that most of the Referral traffic is still showing it comes from Google. The interesting thing is just how many countries this comes from, and I know that traffic from Asia etc is unlikely to make me a sale, whereas traffic from the USA or UK could.

By: Greekgeek

Greekgeek — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 05:06:28 +0000

I hope you're right! Unfortunately, while this "not provided" mess really makes things difficult for us as writers trying to learn what our readers are looking for, Google's primary users are not us, but people searching the web. They don't care if we can't see what search queries they use. All they want is to be able to Google something, and find a result that matches their query. As long as Google's doing that, then Google's main customer base is satisfied. (In fact, Google users don't even care if it's the best result, as long as the result adequately satisfies their query.) I'm afraid that Google can get away with a lot of shenanigans that bother us as web content makers, as long as web content consumers are happy.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:32:51 +0000

Well at least that clears up a mystery for me as to why my squidoo traffic mostly seems to be coming from ‘referrals’. G is really push the envelope as far as I’m concerned. When a competitor comes out with a search product that can compete I see people abandoning google in droves.

By: Greekgeek

Greekgeek — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:56:01 +0000

You’re right: all the big companies seem to be embracing the “walled garden for stuff that should be public, no walls/no privacy for stuff that should be private” approach.

St. Tim Berners-Lee, saaaaaave us!

By: Joan Hall

Joan Hall — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 05:42:26 +0000

I hate it. One of my top-ranking lenses never would have been written were it not for all the traffic stats containing the phrase “youth choir” that I was seeing on another lens.

By: bj aka IncomeFromHomeTips

bj aka IncomeFromHomeTips — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 01:30:43 +0000

It’s all tied together in Google’s plan to wall off the web. First they encourage everyone to stay logged into Google+, which is . . . Google. Then they serve all their results both from the search engine and G+ via https, which is secure socket, supposedly for privacy, but that also keeps people like us from data harvesting things like keyphrases. I can’t even get the keyphrases in AWStats for my own website anymore, at least not from Google! They’ve come a long way from their “Don’t be evil.” days . . .

By: Sheri

Sheri — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 19:24:32 +0000

Thanks for explaining this. I was wondering what was going on.