Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Keywords Unavailable

I've had a web tracker installed on my blogs for years. The tracker lets me know all kinds of interesting facts...such as the most popular posts, where visitors come from, and the keywords they used to get to my blog.

Over the past few weeks I've noticed that more and more of the keyword activity results are blocked. Instead, I get the message "Keywords Unavailable". This week almost 90% of the results weren't accessible. I had to find out why!

It didn't take long to find out the answer. The culprit is Google, using something called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). According to the Google Blog:
"Google Search uses SSL to encrypt the connection between your computer and Google to help prevent intermediary parties, like internet cafes, ISPs, and wifi hotspots, from intercepting or interfering with your search activities."
I'm not sure if the security is entirely positive.  As a Web searcher I appreciate that my surfing won't get into the wrong hands.  On the other hand, it's not as much fun looking at the statistics any more.

Five years ago today: Our Daily Bread

5 comments:

  1. you are so good at discovering these unknowns Kathy. I suppose safety first.

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  2. Actually, I'm trying to stay below (or is it above?) the web crawler radar. My son was unhappy that photos from my blog of him were turning up on Google Images under his real name. I'm now referring to him by his middle name instead of his first name. I hope that works.

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    1. I've asked my family members a couple of times if my blogging activity bothers them. So far they've said no. If I were to do it over again I would have used pseudonyms from the start.

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  3. There is no anonymity on the internet. As for the stats, doesn't Blogger offer those to you? WordPress gives me a whole page of material every day if I want it as to who came, how they came, what they clicked. I'm often amused by the words or phrases that get people to my blog. Same thing with flickr, it has its own stats but don't show the actual web addresses of those who look at my photos.

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