I recently spoke at the Pubcon Conference in Las Vegas, and one of the big issues that came up was the fact that Google is no longer providing keyword search data to website owners.
They’re now encrypting searches, forcing all users of Google search to use https as a default. The search engine marketing community is not happy that we’ve lost our keyword data. The “not provided” keyword data kept going up and up until now it’s virtually non-existent.
Well, now apparently if you use the ?nord=1 parameter and drop the https, the search will stay unencrypted.
Barry over at Search Engine Land has the details:
For example, searching Google for SSL would bring you to this secure URL. Trying to remove the https in front of it, will still bring you to the https version.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ssl
But if you add ?nord=1 and drop the https, the URL will stick on the non-SSL version.
http://www.google.com/?nord=1#nord=1&q=ssl
You have to make some changes here, but how great would it be if someone built an add-on for Google Chrome or Firefox that would unencrypt your Google searches? Well, certainly if more Google users used it then website owners would begin to get their keyword data back.
Better yet, I have developed a bookmarklet that allows you to search Google and then hit the bookmarklet in your web browser. This will remove the decryption on your search result, and you can pass that keyword data over to the website owner.
First drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar:
Then, after performing a Google search, hit the bookmarklet. You will then be taken back to the Google search results page. You will need to remove the https part of the URL. Then, your search is no longer encrypted.
Still working on a JavaScript solution to change https to http in the URL, if you can help let me know.