If like me, you’re running a WordPress site, you’ll use the Site Stats to check your visitor-flow, which articles are popular, how they got there, etc … in order to improve them.
Since a few weeks, I’ve noticed more and more encrypted_search_terms hits in the Search Engine Terms on the blog. Since I’m not running any content that features those encrypted_search_terms phrases, I found this pretty odd.
Turns out, this is what Google sends you along as a referer when you’re logged in with your Google account and browse the Google site over SSL and click through one of the search results in the search engine. It’s annoying as you won’t be able to tell how people reached your site with the Site Stats module in WordPress, whereas you used to be able to see the exact search terms people used to find your pages.
Guess we’ll have to live with the fact that ones you are logged in with a Google account, search terms become anonymous.