Microsoft has announced that Bing will soon be expanding its encryption with the use of TLS protocols.
What does this mean?
Traffic originating from Bing will start to come from https://www.bing.com, instead of http://www.bing.com.
According to the company, Bing has offered the option to encrypt search traffic for the past year and a half. However, businesses will soon be discovering that their search traffic coming from Bing will be encrypted by default.
This may be good news for Bing users – but it’s not so great for the SEO community.
The company will still be passing along a referrer string so webmasters and marketers will know what traffic is coming from Bing. But they will no longer be providing the used query terms. So, marketers will not know all the keywords users have used to find their site on Bing.
Bing has made some effort to support webmasters and marketers through tools that will “provide some limited query term data,” as the company puts it. These tools include Search Query Terms Report, Universal Event Tracking, and Bing Webmaster Tools with keyword and ranking data.
Microsoft says in the announcement:
“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.”
Webmasters and marketers are probably not unfamiliar with dealing with search traffic encryption. Google has been encrypting search traffic for years, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
The new Bing encryption changes will begin rolling out this summer. The company has said changing over to default encryption will be a process so you might not see the changes all at once.
Image: Bing
This article, "New Bing Encryption Makes Marketing More Complicated" was first published on Small Business Trends
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