It has now been confirmed that Yahoo is following in the footsteps of Google, in making all their searches secure. More specifically, all searches from the Yahoo.com property are secure, the Yahoo sites for other countries haven’t yet made the move, though they undoubtedly will in the very near future.
This is part of an overall move to have virtually all traffic going from Yahoo made more secure. Of course, this is a good thing for users of the site. The problem is, like Google, this will severely limit the type of data that comes from these searches. When marketers look at their site stats today, they likely see a lot of traffic from Google, but it doesn’t tell them which search terms the visitors typed in to get there.
Yahoo has taken this a step further. They aren’t even passing on the fact that the traffic is coming from Yahoo. This means that virtually all traffic from Yahoo searches will now show up as direct traffic to the page. This, of course, makes it nearly impossible for marketers to know what types of SEO efforts are effective for Yahoo. Google does provide the information that the traffic is from Google, but with no specific search terms, it is very limiting as well.
As of now, Bing is the only search engine that still offers this information by default. They too, however, have a secure search option available that customers can opt into if they want. It seems likely that Bing will eventually make this the default option as well.
Marketers are looking for ways to discover what types of information can be gathered so they can find out what keywords users are typing in, but at this point there is not much that can be done.
So, if you’ve seen a dramatic drop in yahoo traffic, and a big jump in ‘direct’ traffic, don’t worry. It is likely just the results of this change by Yahoo.
What do you think about this move? How will this limit your ability to perform SEO? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
