This post purely reflects my own personal opinion, and does not reflect those of my employer or colleagues. For those faint of heart, warning: contains traces of black hat material.
So Google has taken our keyword data away, probably for good. What next for SEO?
I think we have to assume this rollout will eventually happen everywhere, for all users. Why? What’s in it for Google?
- Less competition – the data provided on search by firms such as Experian Hitwise, Comscore, Quantcast becomes far less valuable, meaning the only media company that can authoritatively provide keyword data is, you guessed it, Google.
- Less spam – from a purely objective point of view, I do think this will result in much less spam. Sites such as Mahalo, Experts Exchange, etc will all suffer as the pages generated purely based on search volume will die a death, and Google’s results will get better as a result.
- Less SEOs – I don’t think it will kill the industry, but measurement and keyword research becomes a lot harder. The focus will probably get more technical on-site and more social off-site. Google’s not known for its love of the SEO industry so this is probably a nice side benefit for them.
It’s easy to despair and mourn the death of SEO (again) but as long as organic results exist that’s pap.
Here are a few serious/non-serious ideas for workarounds:
1. Deep Content Analysis
Reports on content need to get A LOT better. For example tying up content and technical changes with organic traffic to those pages will become a lot more important in order to judge the success of content strategies.
2. Resurgence of rank tracking (for now)
With less keyword data, SEOs are forced back into the corner of going back to old-school rank tracking in order to measure success. This is a very sad thing considering ethical SEOs have been pushing keyword traffic as a key performance metric for a very long time now, and rankings were starting to become less important.
However I think relying too much on this may well leave SEOs in for a further shock down the line, as search results will probably start looking more like a JavaScript-based web app and less like traditional web pages, making them a lot harder/impossible to parse with traditional screen scraping tools (although maybe experts in Selenium could knock something up).
3. Don a black hat
None of these black hat methods are recommended; however are an indication of the direction certain people may choose to go in as a result of Google’s announcement.
Through hacking into a user’s browsing history (possible, though only for a pre-defined set of URLs), or other such nefarious/illegal activity, it’s probably still pretty easy to figure out referring keywords, and send the data in a manipulated request to Google Analytics (though likely to be against GA ToS).
3a. Develop a popular browser plugin
You may be able to regain some keyword data through developing a browser plugin that tracks a user’s browsing behaviour, much as Google did with their toolbar. Obviously to stay on the legal side of the fence you’d need to hide this as well as you can in the plugin’s T&Cs. Much as Google did with their toolbar.
3b. Develop & spread spyware
Clearly straddling the blackhat/illegal arena, tracking browsing activity through spyware is child’s play.
3c. Develop & spread a virus/trojan/worm
Again, frankly illegal, but another easy way to track the keywords that users are searching for.
4. Develop your own search engine(s)
Many in our industry assume Google has an unassailable position as a search engine. This may or may not be true (remember Altavista?), however that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more search engines on the web. Given the sheer number of open source search engines available all you really have to do is choose one, and customise it for your chosen niche, add some nice features and then start tracking user behaviour.
5. Only allow Google to index your home page
Then put a big search box on your home page and track users’ search behaviour. Clearly has certain drawbacks and would only work if you had an absolute ton of branded searches 
6. Start using a different search engine
A small protest perhaps, but an important one. Webmasters have dived in to Google products as they’ve given us a lot of great products for free. There’s far more in the way of good, free (or cheap) alternatives today to services such as Google Analytics than there were 5 years ago. Personally I’ve set Bing as my default search engine and am relatively happy so far (though the pangs of “I’ll just double check that on Google” have not gone away.)
So that’s just a few collected thoughts, please share your thoughts & ideas below!
Further Reading:
