It’s been a little while since Not Provided has been thrust upon us by Google. With Not Provided looming over head, SEOs are now looking at stripped keyword-level data. This certainly can’t be a good thing, can it? Many looking at it from face value would certainly think so. Why would we want to know not how our keywords are ranking in our content? Of course we’d want to know what’s going on there.
But has anything changed in search marketing? In the words of Benny Blum, not much. When you look at keywords, naturally you look at them as a way to create content. The down side is many of us, consciously or unconsciously, have written content packed with specific terms for an ideal keyword density. This is why Google has decided to hit SEO in the face with the Not Provided bat. Matt Cutts himself has said that if you over optimize for specific terms, that content can now have a negative impact on your SEO. You want to write for the user, not the bot.
Benny has written an article for Marketing Land that expresses his thoughts about removing keywords from natural search as a good thing. Read his full article on why and how you can cope in this new situation by following the link below to Marketing Land:
http://marketingland.com/is-not-provided-a-good-thing-62722