Google’s Matt Cutts has been talking about leveling the playing field for sites that don’t participate in “over-optimization”. Last month at SXSW, Cutts made something of a pre-announcement about such changes, and it looks like a major part of these efforts is now launching.

According to Danny Sullivan, who spoke directly with Cutts, this is indeed the change Cutts was referring to at SXSW, but that Cutts admits “over-optimization” wasn’t he best way of putting it, because it’s really about webspam, and not white hat SEO techniques.

Cutts himself announced a new algorithm change targeted at webpspam, which he describes as black hat techniques. “We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings,” he says.

Link schemes are actually something webmasters have been getting messages from Google about already. The company recently de-indexed paid blog/link networks, and notified webmasters about such links.

“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines,” says Cutts. “We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.”

Google has kind of sent webmasters mixed signals about search engine optimization. They recently shared some SEO DOs and DON’Ts, specifically talking about some white hat things webmasters can do to help Google rank their content better. And Cutts’ point about not divulging specific signals so people can’t game search results is one the company has stood by for ages. But at the same time, Google does divulge algorithm changes it makes via monthly lists, which seem to dare webmasters to play to certain signals. That’s not to say they’re encouraging the kind of black hat stuff Cutts is talking about here, but doesn’t it kind of say, “Hey, these are some things we’re focusing on; perhaps you should be thinking about these things with your SEO strategy?” Isn’t that encouraging “gaming” to some extent, rather than just telling webmasters not to worry about it?

Of course Google always says not to focus on any one signal, and just focus on making good, quality content. In fact, this new change (as in line with Cutts’ comments at SXSW) indicates that sites shouldn’t have to worry about SEO at all.

“We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites,” Cutts says. Emphasis added.

As far as black hat SEO, it’s not as if this is some big change out of the blue. Algorithmically, it’s a change, but Google has always targeted this stuff. There’s a reason Cutts has been the head of webspam. Google has never been shy about penalizing sites violating its quality guidelines. Google even penalized its own Chrome site when some paid linking by the hands of a marketing agency was unearthed.

If you’re engaging in SEO, and Google gets you on black hat tactics, you probably knew what you were doing. You probably knew it was in violation of Google’s guidelines. Of course, that’s assuming Google’s algorithm change does not make any errors. And what are the chances of that happening? Google will be the first to admit that “no algorithm is perfect.” As we saw with the Panda update, there were some sites hit hard, that possibly shouldn’t have been.

So is that happening this time? It’s still early. As far as I can tell, the change hasn’t even finished rolling out. But there are plenty of people already commenting about it.

Others are critical of Google’s search quality in general:

From the comments on Cutts’ announcement:

So far today’s search results are worse than they’ve been for the past month. On one search for a keyword phrase there’s a completely unrelated Wikipedia page, a random Twitter account for some company, and a page from an independent search engine from 1997 showing in the top 10 results. Yeah, that’s the kind of quality user experience we want to see. Way to knock it out of the park.

well now more rubbish results appearing in search than before. more exact domain name match results and unrelated websites . Google failed once again.

so many .info, .co unrelated domains ranked for respected queries. are you sure no mistake in this update?

Surely, whatever these updates are doing, they are not right. Here’s just one example. A search for “ereader comparison chart” brings up “ereadercomparisonchart dot com” on 2nd page of results and it goes “Welcome! This domain was recently registered at namecheap.com. The domain owner may currently be creating a great site for..”
While my site which provided true value to its readers is nowhere to be found.
Please fix this.

there is something wrong with this update . search “viagra” on Google.com 3 edu sites are showing in the first page . is it relevant? matt you failed .

Search Google for a competitive term such as “new shoes” — look who’s #1: Interpretive Simulations – NewShoes – (Intro to Marketing, Marketing Principles). All competitive terms have some youtube videos on the top which aren’t of any good quality even. This is not what is expected of google. Please revert.

These are results have to be a complete joke, so much unrelated content is now surfaced to the top it’s sickening.

That’s just a sampling. There’s more in other forums, of course, such as WebmasterWorld. There is some more talk about exact match domains being hit. User Whitey says:

News just in to me that a large network of destination related exact match domains [ probably 1000+], including many premium ones [ probably 50+], ultra optimized with unique content and only average quality backlinks with perhaps overkill on exact match anchor text, has been hit.

A few of the premium one’s have escaped. Not sure if the deeper long tail network which were exact match have been effected, but they would have had little traffic.

The sites were built for pure ranking purposes, and although largely white hat, didn’t do much beyond what other sites in the category do.

User Haseebnajam says:

Ranking Increase = squidoo, blogspot, forums, subdomains
Ranking Decrease = exact match domains, sites with lots of backlink from spun content sources

User driller41 says:

I am seeing changes in the UK today, most of my affiliate sites are down which is annoying – all are exact match domains btw.

Most of the backlinks are from web2.0 sites with spun content in the downed sites.

One interesting point is that one of the sites which I had built most links to is unafected – the only differnce between this and my downed sites is that I never got around to adding the affiliate outlinks to this website – so google does not know that this site is an affiliate and thus no punishment has been dished out.

We’ll keep digging for more on the Google’s webmspam update.

Update: More on that viagra thing.

The new algorithm change is launching over the next few days, Cutts says, and it will impact 3.1% of queries in English, “to a degree that a regular user might notice.” It affects about 3% of queries in German, Chinese and Arabic, but in “more heavily-spammed languages,” he says. “For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.”

The Gmail team at Google announced in a Google+ post that the ‘people widget’ in Gmail would now display up to 3 recent photos that person has sent you. The photos will link back to the emails they were sent in.

The ‘people widget’ is the box on the upper-right side of an email that displays the name of the person in your email conversation. The widget offers different options pertaining to the person, including adding them to a Google+ circle or suggesting other people you may know through them.

About half of the comments to the Google+ post were praise to the Gmail team for providing this minor upgrade. The other half turned the comments section into a place to complain or beg for Gmail features they want or miss. Popular requests for the Gmail team included contact pictures with better resolution and an upgrade for Google tasks.

Personally, I would never have noticed the change if I had not seen this post. Along with a commenter to the post, I don’t pay attention to the widgets. I had to dig into my Gmail settings to even see if it was turned on, and then had to search for someone who often sent me pictures. So it has a small window of usefulness, but it’s nice to see that the people working on Gmail are concerned about the little things as well.

“The Overview report provides an at-a-glance view of essential information for measuring your site’s page loading metrics: Avg. Page Load Time by Browser, Country/Territory, and Page,” explains Google’s Mustafa M. Tikir. “Plus you can compare your site’s average performance over time to forecast trends and view historical performance. All of these tools can help you identify where your pages may be underperforming and adjust so more visitors land on your site instead of waiting in frustration or leaving.”

“Previously there was only one Site Speed report, this has been renamed to ‘Page Timings’”, adds Tikir. “On the Page Timings report, you can view your site’s load times in three ways: use the Explorer tab to explore average load time across dimensions, use the Performance tab to see how the load times break down by speed ranges, or use the Map Overlay tab to see how the load times breakdown by geography.”

Google notes that it has also updated the Intelligence Reports to include average site load times and all Page Timings metrics.

In addition to all of this, sites with less than 10,000 visits per day can increase the site speed sample rate up to 100% and get full samples for page load time.

Here’s the list for February:

• More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
• Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
• Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
• More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
• More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
• More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
• Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
• Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
• Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
• “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
• Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
• Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
• More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
• Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
• Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
• Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
• Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
• Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
• International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”] Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
• Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
• Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
• Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
• Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
• Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
• Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
• Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
• Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
• Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
• Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
• SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
• Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
• Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

Have you seen effects from Google’s most recent algorithm changes? Let us know in the comments.

Some have apparently already been feeling the effects of Google’s algorithmic early this year. Webmasters were quick to point the finger at the old panda, but Google assures us that this is not the case. A spokesperson for the company told WebProNews there have been no Panda updates in 2012 so far (though I’d expect one to launch before too long).

By the way, now that 2011 is over, do you think Panda has done a good job at cleaning up search results?

In the latest edition of the series, on the company’s Inside Search Blog, they highlight 21 changes made in the month of December. The list goes as follows:

• Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.
• More relevant sitelinks. [launch codename “concepts”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.
• Soft 404 Detection. Web servers generally return the 404 status code when someone requests a page that doesn’t exist. However, some sites are configured to return other status codes, even though the page content might explain that the page was not found. We call these soft 404s (or “crypto” 404s) and they can be problematic for search engines because we aren’t sure if we should ignore the pages. This change is an improvement to how we detect soft 404s, especially in Russian, German and Spanish. For all you webmasters out there, the best practice is still to always use the correct response code.
• More accurate country-restricted searches. [launch codename “greencr”] On domains other than .com, users have the option to see only results from their particular country. This is a new algorithm that uses several signals to better determine where web documents are from, improving the accuracy of this feature.
• More rich snippets. We improved our process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets. As a result, you should start seeing more sites with rich snippets in search results.
• Better infrastructure for autocomplete. This is an infrastructure change to improve how our autocomplete algorithm handles spelling corrections for query prefixes (the beginning part of a search).
• Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results.
• Google Instant enhancements for Japanese. For languages that use non-Latin characters, many users use a special IME (Input Method Editor) to enter queries. This change works with browsers that are IME-aware to better handle Japanese queries in Google Instant.
• More accurate byline dates. [launch codename “foby”] We made a few improvements to how we determine what date to associate with a document. As a result, you’ll see more accurate dates annotating search results.
• Live results for NFL and college football. [project codename “Live Results”] We’ve added new live results for NFL.com and ESPN’s NCAA Football results. These results now provide the latest scores, schedules and standings for your favorite football teams.
• Improved dataset for related queries. We are now using an improved dataset on term relationships to find related queries. We sometimes include results for queries that are related to your original search, and this improvement leads to results from more relevant related queries.
• Related query improvements. [launch codename “lyndsy”] Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are related to the original query but have fewer words. We made several changes to our algorithms to make them more conservative and less likely to introduce results without query words.
• Better lyrics results. [launch codename “baschi”, project codename “Contra”] This change improves our result quality for lyrics searches.
• Tweak to +1 button on results page. As part of our continued effort to deliver a beautifully simple user experience across Google products, we’ve made a subtle tweak to how the +1 button appears on the results page. Now the +1 button will only appear when you hover over a result or when the result has already been +1’d.
• Better spell correction in Vietnamese. [project codename “Pho Viet”] We launched a new Vietnamese spelling model. This will help give more accurate spelling predictions for Vietnamese queries.
• Upcoming events at venues. We’ve improved the recently released places panel for event venues. For major venues, we now show up to three upcoming events on the right of the page. Try it for [staples center los angeles] or [paradise rock club boston].
• Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you’ll tend to see images with larger full-size versions.
• Improved Hebrew synonyms. [launch codename “SweatNovember”, project codename “Synonyms”] This update refines how we handle Hebrew synonyms across multiple languages. Context matters a lot for translation, so this change prevents us from using translated synonyms that are not actually relevant to the query context.
• Safer searching. [launch codename “Hoengg”, project codename "SafeSearch"] We updated our SafeSearch tool to provide better filtering for certain queries when strict SafeSearch is enabled.
• Encrypted search available on new regional domains. Google now offers encrypted search by default on google.com for signed-in users, but it’s not the default on our other regional domains (eg: google.fr for France). Now users in the UK, Germany and France can opt in to encrypted search by navigating directly to an SSL version of Google Search on their respective regional domains: https://www.google.co.uk, https://www.google.de andhttps://www.google.fr.
• Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”] Many websites redirect smartphone users to another page that is optimized for smartphone browsers. This change uses the final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results, so you can bypass all the redirects and load the target page faster.

The image search landing page quality signal change is quite interesting. We ran a great article on optimizing for image search by Michael Gray last year, and that’s full of tips to consider for this less talked about element of SEO, but the adjustments, as unspecific as they may be, reflect Google’s Panda-style focus on quality in search results. This, to me, is saying they’re applying same kind of thinking they do with regular web search to other parts of Google, more than ever before.

Here’s the list of questions Google has presented in the past to consider asking yourself, when evaluating quality.

Note that “better spam detection for image search” is also on the list.

Also note the codenames used throughout the list. Most you probably won’t have to remember like Panda and Caffeine, but it’s still nice to have something to reference for the future.

With regards to the “more rich snippets” item on the list, you may want to check out the series of videos Google recently put out on how to do rich snippets.

Tags – Keyword, Abstract, Description and Title tags must be handled very carefully. Using irrelevant keywords is considered to be spamming. Avoid repetition of keywords and there shouldn’t be more than 20 keywords in a keyword tag. Abstract Tags are quite similar to Keyword tags. It is used to increase keyword density in Meta tags. However, the Abstract tag must not be overloaded with the keyword. In search engines, the sentence that is featured is the Meta description tag. Hence, this should target the keywords. The description that the visitors see on the browser is the Title tag. It should be different for every page.

Content – In an attempt to increase keyword density, the quality of content is compromised, which would adversely affect future search listings of the website or webpage.

Backlinks – People are under the impression that only the quantity of backlinks matter. However, quality also matter, Excessive number of backlinks and low quality can lead to de-indexing of a website in extreme cases.

On Thanksgiving Day, during the Lions vs. Packers game, Google aired a commercial for their Google+ social network. The title of the commercial was “Google+: Sharing but like real life”.

The advertisement plays up that it’s different from Facebook, allowing you to organize your family, friends, and random people you know into various Circles. You can check it out below.

What did you think of the commercial? Tell us what you thought below.

Personally, I thought it was a little dry compared to some of their other commercials, like the ones they did for Google Chrome.

At the Hong Kong event (taking place last night for those of us in the West), the new Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS was unveiled, as was its flagship device, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (previously referred to as the Nexus Prime).

The Galaxy Nexus (seen above), is the new member of the Google phone lineage. It lives up to many of the specs that have been rumored for some time including a 4.65 inch screen, 1GB RAM and a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor.

That giant screen is a Super AMOLED true HD experience – running at 1280×720 resolution. By all hands-on accounts, it’s one of the most gorgeous looking screens on the market.

As far as the camera goes, it’s a 5 megapixel device with an instant shutter (like the iPhones 4S). You can shoot 1080p HD video with the Galaxy Nexus.

It’s a thin phone, measuring 8.84mm thick (and 4.29 mm bezel) and has a new, sleek feel as there are no mechanical buttons – everything is built into the touch surface, including the home button. The device comes equipped with NFC capabilities, which not only sets the stage for mobile payments but allows for the Android Beam feature – a way for users to share apps, videos, contacts and more by “bumping” their Nexus with another Nexus. It’s also a 4G phone, as promised.

But one of the biggest draws of the Galaxy Nexus is in the software – the all new Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS. Google sought to create an OS that would function equally as well of tablets as mobile devices, a Gingerbread-Honeycomb on steroids.

“This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe,” says Google product manager Evelyn Kao.

There’s a chance that your Google experience will be slower with SSL because the computer your’e using has to establish a secure connection with Google. This is interesting, considering that Google has put so much effort into speeding things up.

It’s worth noting that you can just go to https://www.google.com when you’re signed out, and still use encrypted search.

Naturally, webmasters and SEOs are contemplating the effects this will have on search engine optimization and analytics.

Sites visited from Google’s organic listings will be able to tell that the traffic is coming from Google, but they won’t be able to receive info about each individual query. They will, however, receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to the site for each of the past 30 days in Webmaster Tools.

“This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic,” says Kao. “If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”

“When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google ‘organic’ search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site,” says Amy Chang on the Google Analytics blog. “Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google ‘cpc’.”

“We are still measuring all SEO traffic. You will still be able to see your conversion rates, segmentations, and more,” she adds. “To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token ‘not provided)’ within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that ‘cpc’ paid search data is not affected.”

Google is making the encrypted search available on all of its search properties except for Maps.