HTTPSGoogle are pushing HTTPS hard. Why?

And, when should you act?

Mark Thomas | @SearchMath | SEMDays

Why push HTTPS?

https://www.google.com/events/io/schedule/session/84d2d68d-a2bc-e311-b297-00155d5066d7

June 26th 2014

“Individually, the meta data you can gather from unencrypted sites can seem benign, when you put it all together it uncovers a lot about my intent and can actually compromise privacy.” Ilya Grigorik

August 2014

“Making the internet safer more broadly”

Maile Ohye SMX Advanced 2015

HTTPS benefits:

• Authenticates the site• Grants data integrity for the client• Gives encryption which is good for the user

“For new and particularly powerful web platform features, browser vendors prefer to make the feature available only to secure origins by default.”

Sounds interesting!!!!

August 2014

“Making the internet safer more broadly”

“Over time, we may decide to strengthen it.”

“It’s only a very lightweight

signal”

https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Where are we?

HTTPS & Mobile updates had a lot to live up to

•Growing trend towards HTTPS

Jan March April May June July August5%

6%

7%

8%

9%

10%% Alexa Top 100K Websites on HTTPS (2015), DeepCrawl

Jan March April May June July August0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%% Alexa Top 100K Websites HTTPS/HTTP, DeepCrawl

HTTPS HTTP

Opportunity

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/12/securing-wikimedia-sites-with-https/

•http://searchengineland.com/google-makes-penalty-mistakes-buffer-story-203591

Why are people experiencing so many problems?

• Speed - HTTPS runs slower than HTTP

• All resources (JS, CSS, images) need to be on HTTPS.

• Internal links, Sitemaps, canonical tags, robots.txt file and analytics tracking codes need to be updated to refer to HTTPS version.

• 302 redirects not a clear enough signal that the site has moved to HTTPS. Google specifically state that 301 redirects should be used.

• Avoid redirect chains – avoid latency

• HSTS not enabled in addition to HTTPS

• Might incur issues with third-party resources (e.g. ad networks)

• Analytics and backlink data could be affected.

• Social shares also need to be migrated/managed to retain social proof (only Facebook, Google +1 and LinkedIn shares transfer automatically, although this can still take weeks/months).

Verify all site variants in Search Console!

Managing HTTPS migration

When should you migrate?

New Websites: Definitely build on HTTPS

Existing Websites: Migrate to HTTPS when

you’re next planning a domain

migrationOr,

Build the infrastructure to

support HTTPS during a site

redevelopment for a later URL migration

Google’s position+12 Months

Dealbreaker

You can adjust some of the parameters to get different data.

y=p - Daily Pageviewsy=q - Search Visits %y=r - Daily Reachy=s - Time on Sitey=t - Global Ranky=u - Pageviews per usery=b - Bounce Rate\

o=a to o=g - Graph style

r=6y - 6 yearsr=6m - 6 monthsr=6d - 6 days

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=800&h=600&o=f&c=1&y=p&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=onthemarket.com&u=zoopla.co.uk&u=rightmove.co.uk

A more conciliatory tone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekvnE4YMeyM#t=23m08s

“Maybe it makes sense to wait half a year or so until all of the ad networks I rely on to keep the site running are ready to handle HTTPS properly.”

August 28th 2015

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/onsite-seo-in-2015-an-elegant-weapon-for-a-more-civilized-marketer

Where next?

HTTP/2 > HTTP/1.1

http://www.slideshare.net/rngirard/smx-advanced-2015-seattle-seo-highlights

HTTP/2 Goals

1. User perceivable improvement in web site performance

2. Work with today’s internet

3. Remain compatible with existing content

What is HTTP/2?

HTTP/2 (originally named HTTP/2.0) is the second major version of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web. It is based on SPDY.

HTTP 1 was designed for webpages with few external assets. Browsers typically downloaded assets sequentially, but this wasn’t a problem on lighter pages.

https://http2.github.io/

What is HTTP/2?

Now most webpages have 50+ resources, which is difficult for HTTP 1 to handle.

HTTP/2 downloads many resources at the same time, prioritizes them and supports compressed HTTP headers.

https://http2.github.io/

The proposed changes do not require any changes to how existing web applications work, but new applications can take advantage of new features for increased speed.

HTTP/2 allows the server to "push" content, that is, to respond with data for more queries than the client requested. 

https://http2.github.io/

HTTP/2 enables a more efficient use of network resources and a reduced perception of latency by introducing header field compression and allowing multiple concurrent exchanges on the same connection. It also introduces unsolicited push of representations from servers to clients.

This specification is an alternative to, but does not obsolete, the HTTP/1.1 message syntax. HTTP's existing semantics remain unchanged.

Googlebot did not (as of June 2nd 2015) support HTTP/2https://http2.github.io/

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7540

https://blog.httpwatch.com/2015/01/16/a-simple-performance-comparison-of-https-spdy-and-http2/

HTTP/2+20% to

30% Quicker

HTTP/1.1

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ce-http2/all/all

Popular sites using HTTP/2

Google.comYoutube.comTwitter.comGoogle.co.inGoogle.co.jpGoogle.deT.coGoogle.co.ukGoogle.frGoogle.com.br

Browser support

Chrome supports HTTP/2. Currently only HTTP/2 over TLS is implemented

Chrome for iOS supports HTTP/2 Firefox supports HTTP/2 which has been enabled

since version 36. Experimental support for HTTP/2 was originally added in version 34. Currently only HTTP/2 over TLS is implemented

Internet Explorer supports HTTP/2 in version 11, but only for Windows 10. Currently only HTTP/2 over TLS is implemented

Microsoft Edge supports HTTP/2 Opera supports HTTP/2 Safari 9 supports HTTP/2

And finally, the punch line…

• HTTP/2 and HTTPS

“Although the standard itself does not require usage of encryption, most client implementations (Firefox, Chrome) have stated that they will only support HTTP/2 over TLS, which makes encryption de facto mandatory.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2

Thank youSlides available: @SearchMATH