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Comment by cyanbane | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I am wrong, but this could have pretty big implications for people tracking query terms on anything that has been self created (for SEO purposes etc). Other analytics packages (self-rolled/3rd party) won't have near the amount of data that Google Analytics will correct?

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Google Analytics won't have the queries either: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-sec...

So Google says 'we will play the game just like everyone else' and not report to you organic search terms coming from SSL (even though we have access to the data), but we also have a product (webmaster tools) that we can show you who is searching for what to get to your site, albeit slightly more obfuscated? It certainly sounds like a win for end users, not really sure it helps webmasters trying to see inbound search terms though. It sounds like it makes people have to put a little more value on the stats that Google provides via webmaster tools.

If referrers from HTTPS pages were sent to HTTP pages by browsers anyone sniffing the connection would know the URL the user visited. For a search engine, this would make SSL pretty useless as the main thing worth encrypting is search queries and people usually end up clicking links to non-SSL pages.

I presume they're working around it for ads and (telling webmasters the user is coming from Google) by sending the user through a HTTP page before they reach the result (like DuckDuckGo does, but for the opposite reason).

Referer headers are still sent when you go from one SSL page to another. So, the greatest impact of this development will actually be to force the rest of the web to use SSL, because they need it for analytics.

I didn't' realize the referrer (and querystring param) was sent cross domain over SSL. So as long as you are utilizing SSL everything should remain the same.

My reading of it has them blocking referrers even if the target page is https. See: http://searchengineland.com/google-to-begin-encrypting-searc...

Yes well, regardless of what any SEO blogs may say, the fact is that browsers do send referer headers when travelling from one SSL page to another.

So unless gAnalytics is going to be deliberately ignoring incoming referer headers in particular circumstances from now on, things should remain the same if your page uses SSL.

I willing to believe however that they actually are going to be deliberately ignoring/discarding the data even when it's available. That would certainly make the EU happy.

Your use of "them" is a bit unclear.

The browser decides when to send a referrer, not Google. You can, for instance, tell your browser never to send them, or to send a specific one.

Google could wipe the referrer, though.

They can create a bounce page, but they have no control over what referrer actually gets sent. The browser, not the website, sends the referrer.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/HTTP_referrer

In HTML5 you can apparently request that a referrer not be sent, but that's a request, not a command.

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