This move might impact marketers and webmaster, it admits

Jun 16, 2015 07:50 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has just announced that, beginning this summer, all Bing search engine traffic will be encrypted by default, one year and a half after the company started offering such a feature optionally.

Redmond says that such a decision is necessary to further protect its customers and points out that, since Bing search results will switch from http to https, webmasters and marketers might be impacted.

In other words, when this change occurs this summer, they will no longer see the used query terms, with Microsoft promising to include a referrer string to let them see that traffic is coming from Bing.

But getting no information regarding the keywords that were used for a specific search is clearly a problem, so Microsoft recommends them to turn to the Search Query Terms Report, the Universal Event Tracking, or Bing Webmaster Tools, which all provide “some limited query term data” without compromising user security.

Users are the most important

Microsoft is well aware that encrypting search engine traffic isn’t quite good news for webmasters and marketers, but it says that users are more important right now because they need a secure operating system that won’t be tracking all their searches (as a matter of fact, Google started encrypting searches in October 2011).

“Microsoft has a long-history and deep commitment to helping protect our customers’ data and the security of their systems. While this change may impact marketers and webmasters, we believe that providing a more secure search experience for our users is important,” the company explains.

“With this change, you will still be able to see Bing as the origin (referrer) of the encrypted traffic, though analytics tools you are using to analyze your traffic generally have their own, proprietary way of including this information in their search reports.”

Bing is currently the world’s second most used search engine worldwide after Google, with stats pointing to a market share of around 20 percent (well behind Google’s share of 65 percent).