Google "Keywords Unavailable" changes in IE

[roseberry99]

Has anyone noticed a shift in Google KW unavailable in IE starting around Aug. 15. For me it had been pretty steady at about 14% unavailable for several months, on the 15th it moved up to about 20% and now it's up to about 26%.

Seems to be across all version of IE (by the way chrome and FF both still have a very high % of KW unavailable - over 50% in my case).

I normally don't start threads like this, but haven't heard or read anything about this and wanted to see if this is happening for others or if anyone might be able to provide some more specifics.

[aakk9999]

When you say "Keywords Unavailable", do you mean (not provided) or (not set) ?

We had a recent discussion on the increase of "Not provided" in this thread [webmasterworld.com...]

With regards to "Not set", all direct traffic will have this, and this could also appear if you are using Adwords and the Adwords account is not set up correctly.

Also, are you saying that this pattern has increased only for your Internet Explorer visitors? If so, can you isolate it to a particular version of Internet Explorer?

[roseberry99]

yeah - not provided (omniture calls it "keyword unavailable"). Anyway, it's google search referrals that pass without the q= parameter in the query string, not direct that i'm talking about.

Seems there was a change in some encryption related to IE.

And yes it is only IE and looks to have a similar pattern across all versions.