subject: Updated Google Policies [print this page] After March 2011, Google announced to consolidate these policies and produce a single document that is more understandable and will remove the repetition and redundancies in the database which simply meant that Google was now going to share the data of all these services into a single database. All the Gmail account information will be stored in the same database that other services like Google maps or You Tube would use, providing the access to a user's private information. Many software technology blogs reviewed and discussed this change in policies brought about by the search giant.
But according to Google, only the management methods have changed and in all this "mixing and merging", users' privacy has not been compromised.
The Adwords criterion, which was more user oriented, was based on the deductions made form the history and other saved searches present in the browser's cache, shows only the related Ads. But with updated policies in Ads, they would be more keyword oriented and will also match the context of the query searched for.
A new update, known as Search Plus Your World, was also introduced by Google in their search algorithm. With this modification, when a user is logged in his Gmail account and makes a search in Google, the top results were piped from the database of Google+ and then added to the other organic results. The problem with this was that it didn't provide a comprehensive personal search as it didn't show results form other popular social media platforms but Google+. So, to provide the links from other social media, extensions from these social sites were added onto a single web page. So whenever user makes any search, say for iPhone Apps Development, wherever user is logged in, results for the keyword from that social media would also shown in the search result.
Another policy change that may interest SEOs or webmasters is change in the reporting policy of the referral traffic in web analytics tool. Webmasters use web analytic tools to analyze certain parameters like the flow of traffic onto their web page, the keywords that redirected the user to their page, the page from which user came from etc. and make decisions to carefully optimize the ranking of their web pages.
With the new policy, while user is logged in the secure mode and makes a search, in chrome browser, with a keyword, web analytic tool would record only the event of search that has happened from the page Google.com and whichever the website, user has been redirected to, Google would be kept as a referrer in the report. In contrast with this, earlier whenever a user entered a keyword in Google, despite of redirecting the user directly to the web-page, the user was redirected via Google and a keyword was tracked particularly for that search, making it available in the report. But with the updated policy, the concept of so called "Search Traffic" has been completely wiped off and Google would be the sole referrer against any search made on Google. All the traffic onto a web-page would totally be either direct traffic or referral traffic.
The introduction of these policies have provided more negative than positive reviews to Google, while Google keeps on justifying its users about these changes and keeps on mentioning that user's privacy is still their primary concern.
