Late last year when Google decided to hide the source of the traffic to websites from organic searches, they had predicted that it would impact less than 10% of the searches. However, more sites are starting to complain that it’s growing to be much higher than what was predicted. Poynter.org says Adtrak reports:
Figures reiterated quite often on blogs, forums and in tweets suggest that some 20% of their keyword traffic is hidden behind secure search (when a person is signed into their Google account and searching the web).
and they continued to expound on their own traffic as well:
Poynter.org’s analytics: Keywords were hidden in 29 percent of searches in April. That’s up from 22.5 percent in November, shortly after the change was made. Now “(not provided)†makes up the largest category of search terms, dwarfing the second place term: Poynter. Overall, 6 percent of inbound traffic now comes from a black box.
When analyzing our latest organic search results, we found that about 34.6% of our traffic was in the “Not Provided” category. So, we can validate it’s growing quite a bit.
