In May this year Google unveiled their latest product, Google Secure Search. Secure Search or SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is Google’s very on secure search engine, or in Google’s words:
“SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers. When you search over SSL, your search queries and search traffic are encrypted so they can’t be read by any intermediary party such as employers and internet service providers (ISPs).”
So what’s the point of secure search? Well Google say it’s for people using a public computer, an open WiFi network or for “sensitive” searches. It works by encrypting your search queries so that your search terms and result pages are hidden from any third party tracking software.
So what does this mean for SEO? The main thing here is that the use of third party tracking software will be useless. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Google obstruct search tracking. Last year they started to introduce Google Personalised search for everyone (even outside of iGoogle), this meant that reporting on rankings wouldn’t be quite as accurate as people would hope and could eventually mean (if Google continue to push it) that it would be so inaccurate that third party rank tracking software would be completely ineffective. However, as with the personlised search Google offered a solution in Google Analytics. Analytics is the key again here, SSL encrypts your search queries to all software apart from Google’s own.
Fortunately for the tracking companies out there Google SSL won’t appeal to everyone. SSL will suffer from some speed realted issues which may be a big turn off to most. This is because every time you use Google SSL it has to establish a secure connection before every search.
