Marketers Plan. Google Laughs.

The end of September was busy for Google. It celebrated its 15^th anniversary, released an algorithm update called “Hummingbird,” and made a lot of marketing professionals cry.

Let’s start this journey in the light and travel slowly into Google’s heart of darkness.

To celebrate its mid-adolescence, Google, of course, made a fun Google Doodle game. Bored desk jockeys everywhere can spend a few seconds hitting the spacebar to see an anthropomorphized letter “g” hit a piñata (or look like it’s going to have an emotional breakdown whenever it misses). Google also created an Easter egg; if you search for “Google in 1998,” you’ll get just that.

On the more serious side, Google released the first major algorithm update in three years: Hummingbird. The update is intended to make longer, more complex queries deliver better results. As voice recognition software is (finally) getting good enough for regular use, people are talking to their devices as they’d talk to people. Instead of typing in highly specific keywords, we’re asking questions that may or may not contain more information about what we want. So Google has made its search engine better at parsing long-form queries to accommodate our changing search habits.

From a marketing perspective, Hummingbird allows the search engine optimizer to target longer key phrases. We can start focusing on the natural cadence of a human question when it comes to our content composition and optimization. Google will also try to extract greater meaning from these inquiries instead of delivering based on the words alone. Similar to Knowledge Graph, it’s trying to make connections among the diverse bits of content that are out there—it’s trying to make sense of it.

Hummingbird has been in action for more than a month, now. It’s a natural and expected step for Google to elevate the substance of content over the disparate pieces of data it contains.

Now, let’s move on to that which has caused many expletives to be uttered in the workplace: Google’s move to encrypt all organic search data. You may soon notice that Google Analytics will simply let you know that the keyword data is “not provided” for almost all of your organic search data. Quietly and over many months, Google has been making more and more of its organic keyword data unavailable. That means that marketers won’t get any keyword data in referrals from Google. It’s awfully difficult to optimize your content for how people search when you have no idea how people are finding you. Marketers won’t be able to tell directly which target keywords or key phrases are performing well and which are underperforming.

Marketers and web property owners are frustrated because their ability to serve customers has been diminished. They can’t do the type of targeted improvements that would make the web more usable, which seems to go against what Google claims to want (but we’ll get to Google’s motivations in a moment). Marketers, specifically, are left out in the rain, because that referral data was proof that their efforts were working; it’s how they could justify their worth.

So how do we make our way in the jungle of the internet, now that it is so much darker? We amass evidence. We no longer have direct access to the keyword referral data, so we need to go back to looking at other indicators, such as individual pages on a site that are doing well and more generic rank data for some keywords. At this point, we’re back to inference. We can also use Google Webmaster Tools and AdWords data.

This is where people start getting angry. AdWords search data is not being restricted in the same manner, so a few cynical marketers see the encryption of organic keyword data as a way to push people toward using AdWords to target and monitor specific keywords. There’s also speculation that Google has ramped up its referral data encryption in response to the NSA spying program—marketers may not know the specifics about how people are finding a website, but neither does the NSA.

Another potentially web-healthy motivation for Google’s secrecy is its long-time promotion of quality content. Google doesn’t want you to over-optimize your content and earn more traffic than you deserve. It wants the highest quality site to win. This could be a well-deserved deathblow for link builders and content farms that churn out low quality content designed to trick Google, but Google could have shifted its focus to place even more weight on on-site user behavior. If the user can’t differentiate between high- and low-quality content, we’re lost anyway.

So, happy birthday, Google. In the past 15 years, you’ve changed the world. You’ve done great things, and you’ve stirred up immense controversies. You’ve been the impetus for cultural and legal change. You’re nearly synonymous with the whole of the internet itself. For a 15-year-old, we’re all very impressed with you.