Bing To Encrypt Search This Summer & Screws SEOs/Marketers

Bing announced yesterday that this summer Bing will begin defaulting all search over HTTPS/TLS, which means they will be stripping out the keyword referrer data to web sites.

Bing is doing this to secure their search results and protect their searchers, just like Google did back in 2011. But with this, marketers will lose their query data. They won’t know ALL the keywords people use to find them on Bing search.

This is after Bing promised us to keep the SEO community top of mind when they migrate to HTTPS. They clearly are not. Yes, they have webmaster tools where you can get “some limited query term data” as Bing puts it, but not all, not that much to be honest.

I do wonder if they will pass the referrer keyword data to sites that are over HTTPS already. Based on my early tests on using Bing over HTTPS, they will. But I can’t tell if that will remain this summer when they deploy this fully. I suspect not, based on what I read in the announcement.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.