Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Keyword Aggregation

Keyword Aggregation and the reason why Google have blocked keywords from showing in Analytics.

Further to my earlier post on Google saying that they were "making searches safer", I think the real reason that keywords not appear in reports for visitors that are logged into a Google account (GMail, G+ or any other product) is that this information is too valuable to release to the webmaster and it is retained by Google so that your visitors who find you when logged-in will more than likely be directed to another Google service such as G+.

If this information is available to the webmaster, or even an automatic aggregation (as seen on some WordPress blogs that I have seen), the keywords would be too great a magnet for the search engines algorithm. If they are suppressed then they cannot be added to the content of your blog or website. They are added to related, or what Google determine as related, postings. That way if an Internet user makes a similar search they will find the Google page rather than yours.

At the moment the keywords report in Google Analytics is pretty useless as most of the time it is populated with "Not Set". Google have correctly identified that the "premium user" (the ones that they would like to capture) are those that are already logged into their Google account. In addition, the Web History of these users is also being logged and is available to the Google engineers to further refine their search terms and the determination of valuable keywords that can be sold back to the webmaster.

Keywords to Adwords 

Without doubt the most valuable metric that is generated by Analytics are are keyword reports. It is from these keywords that Google can create Adwords for use in their "Sponsored Links section. There is no reason for them to give this information away for free. It does highlight another reason for moving my website postings to a Blogger Blog - it is a Google product and therefore included under the "Google Umbrella", an independent website would fall outside.

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