For State of Search I explored a way to reclaim some of the keyword data that was lost when Google implemented SSL search. With some clever Google Analytics filters and custom reports it’s fairly easy to correlate (not provided) keywords with known keywords, and thus reclaim some of your lost metrics:
State of Search: Yet Another Way to Reclaim (not provided) Data
To start with, we need to implement a filter in Google Analytics that’s been around for a while. This filter extracts the actual rank of a keyword when a user clicks on it on a Google SERP, and attaches it to the site’s organic keyword report in Google Analytics.
In my latest for Search News Central I rile a bit against the latest hype doing the rounds in the SEO industry: Author Rank. While there is some value in this latest addition to Google’s algorithms, I believe its use case is fairly limited and undeserving of the hype:
Search News Central: Why I Think the Author Rank Hype is Misguided
The problem with Author Rank, as I see it, is that it is rather limited in its application. I suppose it’s a good signal for bloggers and journalists, a method of separating low quality content from high quality material, but when you think about it that’s not a particularly broad application. In my opinion, outside of the blogosphere and news sites, Author Rank as a concept has precious little value.
I'm Barry Adams, the digital services director at 
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