(Entry was posted by Suvi Kava on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/11/2013).

How do you deal with (not provided) for SEO reporting?

Hi all, how do you deal with the (not provided) issue while doing SEO reporting?

Have you, for example, given up of reporting the organic traffic without brand-related keywords? That used to be a good way to measure SEO success. But now, if you leave out the (not provided) keywords you might be excluding somewhat over 50 percent of the traffic, but if you count those in, the traffic will include brand-related keywords.

Or do you use some kind of calculators to find out the approximate amount of organic traffic without brand-related keywords?

This question begins at 00:06:35 into the clip. Did this video clip play correctly? Watch this question on YouTube commencing at 00:06:35

OUR ANSWERS

Answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Panelists.

Alistair Lattimore: Google treat named anchors or hash fragments as a single URL when they crawl the content, it won`t cause duplicate content issues as an example. If your article is long & it makes sense to use named anchors to improve usability as Wikipedia does, you should do it for your users. Google also algorithmically determines if & when to display the jump links directly into the search results as well, nice little feature for users also. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/using-named-anchors-to-identify.html
Tim Capper: The (not provided) traffic will reflect your provided traffic - give or take. Also if you look at your landing pages - you can pretty much split up your not provided into percentages of the provided traffic

Share on Twitter

Share on Facebook

YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Alexander Robinson: I usually use my stats and analytics to measure non related keywords. Depending on how some of them perform, I create strategies to target those keywords.
Xanthi Syrakou: It has been really annoying with the whole (not provided) thing. I haven't given up on organic traffic reports, but I do it a bit more manually.
I have my keywords and I check in which position on the serp they are. I keep a spreadsheet with their monthly progress.
And then I check the general traffic from google. For some of my customers I know the market pretty well.
If the keywords are climbing the serp positions and I see an increase in visitors from Google, then I take that as a sign. In my reports I just present the progress on the Google visits and the progress of the keywords together. Luckily (or unluckily) 40-50% of the keywords are (not provided) so I have the other half of hard data to show as well.
Tim Capper: The (not provided) traffic will reflect your provided traffic - give or take.

Also if you look at your landing pages - you can pretty much split up your not provided into percentages of the provided traffic
Ashish Ahuja: The best solution is from google itself webmaster tools. It give figures for the search results for which your website showed up, no of clicks and click thu rate. It would not be as upto date as analytics but it gives a fair idea of where your website is ranking and how your traffic is progressing
Suvi Kava: Ashish, I wouldn't trust even that much to Google Webmaster Tools' figures. Have you read this blog post for example: http://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/google-webmaster-tools-query-data-is-worthless.htm