Google has always used your search data in order to deliver you the most relevant search results. This is why they’ve beat out every other search engine in terms of content curation and prioritization. User data, like search queries, power the search engine and allow it to come up the right answer to whatever question you’re typing in. Google is very transparent about this.
So on March 1st, Google is making an adjustment to their privacy policy. Actually, they’re just combining their terms across all of their properties in order to simplify what to tell people in regards to how their content is processed and analyzed. If you’re curious, Google holds onto your data for 9 months before anonymizing it, and after 18 months they anonymize cookies. Is anyone at Google putting a face to an IP address, or scrolling through your LOLcats search history? Not likely. If you’re a terrorist, perhaps Homeland Security has elbowed their way into those records, but for the average person, nobody cares.
Unfortunately, as there always is with privacy concerns, there are many blogs and organizations telling users to erase their search history “while they have the chance” (aka before March 1st). As if my search data, or your search data, is at all significant or important to anyone other than making Google a better search engine (and that whole Homeland Security Act).
According to PC World, “The Electronic Frontier Foundation is recommending that privacy conscious users delete their Google Web history before the search giant’s new unified privacy policy kicks in.” Why? Because the results you’ll start seeing when you search for things could possibly be related to where you live, your sexual orientation, and things of that nature. Creepy that Google might know a little more than you thought? Sure. Are they using it so that you get the best answer to whatever question you ask? Yes. And remember, they’re not giving this information to anyone else, they’re just using it as a filter for your results. All of these updates to what they collect are meant for a better user experience so they can serve you better ads (they were already serving you ads anyway) and search results, and to integrate all of their different services including a better inclusion with YouTube.
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So back to the business side of things. There’s surely cause to be concerned when there’s a mass panic about people deleting their search data, especially since Google is giving users the option to stop tracking permanently. And yes, if everyone in the world decided today that they were going to delete all of their information, it would surely affect our search engine optimization efforts drastically. I mean, nobody would be technically searching for anything! How would we know what to target?! The horror!
The reality is that probably about 1% of users will actually delete their information. Is 5% a possibility? 10%? Sure. Google makes it easy enough for you to change these setting, so it’s not just the techies that will respond to the hysteria.
You’ve likely seen how fast these things travel around on Facebook. “Protect your privacy! Google is stealing your information!” As if they’re reaching into your mind and telling all of your friends about the types of things you Google. They’re not selling this information to telemarketers, they’re not stealing your credit card information, they’re doing it as a favor to you. And perhaps there are legal reasons that they can’t anonymize it until 9 months later.
So should you be worried that your SEO efforts will become harder in the coming months as everyone races to disable Google from tracking their history this week? My guess is no, because the people rushing to hide that information probably aren’t your customers anyway, but paranoia is contagious.
Contrary to all of the above, if you’re a search marketer it might make sense to delete your web tracking for the sake of getting less-biased results when you target keywords, check rank, etc. Here’s where you can do it: google.com/history
Google also gives you the ability to manage all of your personal information in the Google’s Dashboard, DoubleClick ad tracking, and even manage the types of ad you want to be served.
What do you think? Happy to debate.
