Summer SEO News You Should Know About: HTTPS. Rich Snippets, More

Summer is coming to a close and with it the end of (yet) another memorable season in the world of SEO. When Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, announced his three month sabbatical we all joked that no updates could possibly roll out without him at the helm.

In his absence we’ve heard rumors of a suspected Penguin update, encryption as a ranking signal, and the death of authorship. Here are some of the SEO tidbits you may have missed out on this summer.

HTTPS: Encryption for SEO

Summer SEO News You Should Know About: HTTPS. Rich Snippets, More image https Dollarphotoclub 67642635 300x300Security breaches on the web seem to be an everyday occurrence. Sites large and small are impacted by the nefarious activities of spammers and hackers. Increasing security measures on a site is imperative to protecting a company’s bottom line today, and of course the privacy of your customer’s information. Search engines have taken notice and want to provide a better experience online for their users. In August Google announced they will begin using website encryption, HTTPS, as a ranking signal giving preferential treatment to sites which encrypt data for their users. The change is estimated to effect less than 1% of global queries so far, but has web developers scrambling to make it.

Encryption has always been a best practice as it provides heightened security by encrypting a user’s session with an SSL Digital Certificate. For online banking and ecommerce sites encryption is common, but for other industries it’s less so. Implementation often involves expense and additional measures, which many companies have put off – until now.

A recent study shows that currently to date no ranking benefits were observed as a result of this change. First, Google admittedly did state it was a “very lightweight signal” affecting a small amount of global queries. Some speculate that the roll out may not have gone into full effect yet; still others are calling Google’s bluff. Whichever camp you belong to, it’s clear that encryption is a focus for Google this summer and is likely to increase in importance overtime as the privacy trend continues. Forewarned is forearmed.

Rich Snippets

Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller shocked the SEO community announcing that the search giant is abandoning Google Authorship, a microdata markup attributing content to a particular author. Those in the know may have seen this coming, with a change to search results pages (SERPs) in July when bylines and images were stripped. Something was up with this particular feature.

John Mueller’s announcement, seen here on Google +, explains that through testing they discovered the information wasn’t as useful as once thought; in fact, it was distracting in some instances. Once thought to increase clickthrough rates, author snippets didn’t actually deliver significant improvement. Low adoption rates is likely another cause for the decision to get rid of authorship. While sites like The New York Times adopted markup, the Washington Post (for another example) did not. Without widespread adoption, author snippets didn’t accurately reflect perceived value.

Google plans to continue their discovery of additional uses for rich snippets in SERPs, because rich snippets provide useful information for the end user. Event snippets are growingly common, showing date, location and time of the event in SERPs. Music album snippets, product snippets such as reviews, recipe snippets, and video snippets are just a few of the opportunities available. No doubt rich snippets are here to stay, although it’s unfortunate that some SEO experts continue to recommend continued use of authorship snippets.

Pigeon

One particular Google update of importance this summer was rolled out at the end of July. The update aimed to provide more accurate and relevant local search results. It’s described to have tied more closely traditional web ranking signals with local search signals. Search Engine Land took the liberty of naming it the Pigeon update (“Pigeon is the name we decided on because this is a local search update and pigeons tend to fly back home”).

Summer SEO News You Should Know About: HTTPS. Rich Snippets, More image Pigeon Dollarphotoclub 40706319While speculation abounds with this update, experts noticed that Pigeon affects only English queries in the U.S. Moz has reported reduced numbers of 7-packs that show in local queries, with an increase in 3-packs. Experts have seen that the search radius has been reduced for most local queries and, most importantly, that local businesses seem to be favored over local brands.

Pigeon may seem like a small change, but it’s certainly changed the SERPs for many verticals. As expected, effects are still being monitored and analyzed. Best practices are still important for sites dependent on local traffic. This article discusses some great best practices for local search including:

1. Set up your own individual Google + local page and do it correctly: all information provided, images, local phone number, proper category and consistent name/address/phone number (NAP) information.
2. Consistent NAP throughout your website (About Us and/or footer), and consistent on other online listings as well.
3. Encourage your customers to leave reviews of your business.
4. Geo-specific information should be added to metatags as appropriate, with your site optimized for geo queries.

It’s likely that you’ve been doing most things right with your local strategy. Pigeon will require a second look, ensuring you’re maintaining the best possible website for local rankings. Those trying to benefit from local search without being in that area (i.e., actually local) aren’t likely to benefit much longer. Consider evaluating your current local strategy and revamping as needed based on Pigeon.

Penguin 3.0?

The rumored Penguin 3.0 update on the lips of many has yet to surface this summer. Barry Schwartz speculated that we would see an update over the Labor Day weekend, and Mozcast has been indicating fluctuations in the space for several weeks now. We continue to wait… and wait.Summer SEO News You Should Know About: HTTPS. Rich Snippets, More image penguin with magnifying glass Dollarphotoclub 59892474 e1410210253133 300x228

Protect your site from Penguin

Ensure you’re not a sitting duck for a penalty by looking for the telltale signs of a Penguin prone site. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have over-optimized pages and backlinks with over-optimized commercial anchor text?
2. Do you have a high number of total links but low number of links from unique domains?
3. Have you purchased links in the past or conducted gray-hat link building strategies such as reciprocal links, text link advertisements and link exchanges?
4. Is your backlink profile diversified with a mixture of link types, authority and relevancy?

If you answered yes to #1-#3 you’re not sitting in a good position. If you answered #4 you’re on the right track. Experts recommend reviewing your backlink profile regularly and understanding what a natural backlink profile looks like. Check out this Google Penguin Recovery Kit by Vertical Measures to learn more about recovery tips. To avoid future Penguin penalties clean up past activities and ensure you’re earning authoritative, relevant and worthwhile links from here on out.

Google’s Push For HTTPS Is More About PR Than Search Quality

Is it worth it for webmasters to switch to HTTPS in light of Google's recent announcement?

Earlier this month, Google announced that its search ranking algorithm will now consider whether a site is HTTPS. Does this mean you should now go out and make the switch to HTTPS, or is this just political jousting with no real search relevance on Google’s part?

What Is HTTPS, Anyway?
HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. It’s a variation of the popular HTTP used to transfer web pages across the internet. The difference (the “S”) is that HTTPS adds a layer of security by encrypting the data.

A normal website is accessed by putting http:// before the domain name, such as http://facebook.com. If the site supports HTTPS, the URL will look like https://facebook.com. Typically, browsers will add a padlock icon and will highlight the address bar in green when a site uses HTTPS.

The Push For Security
Over the past few years, Google has pushed for improved security on its site as well as sites in general across the internet, and for good reason. Between the NSA’s spying and routine security breaches that pilfer millions of passwords from popular sites, it’s not a bad idea for a company like Google to take security seriously.

We saw the beginnings of this a few years ago when Google began encrypting search referral terms for logged-in users, which led to a lot of frustration for marketers who no longer had access to keyword data in their analytics packages. This frustration was compounded late last year when Google moved to 100% secure search — whether searchers were logged in to Google or not.

Now, we see another step toward security with Google announcing a potential rankings boost for sites that run HTTPS.

How Will This Impact Your Rankings?
Several years ago, Google announced that site speed would be considered a ranking factor in its search algorithm. As a result, many sites rushed to improve their site load time. While users certainly appreciated the speed improvement, hardly anyone noticed a direct impact to their rankings. Why was that?

Page Speed is what’s called a “modifier.” If two web pages have very similar quality and relevance scores, Google considers which page loads faster as the deciding factor on which ranks higher. The loading speed of the page modified the ranking score only ever so slightly.

Similarly, HTTPS looks to be a modifier, from what I’ve seen. Ninety-nine percent of searches will happen without HTTPS even being looked at; but, in those rare cases when two search results are otherwise “equal,” HTTPS might push one over the edge for the higher ranking.

This Is About Politics, Not Search Quality
Google has a phase it likes to use: “HTTPS Everywhere.” In fact, that’s what they named this year’s I/O Conference. The idea is that if every site implemented HTTPS, the web would be that much more secure; but, it’s a red herring. Here’s why:

HTTPS only protects against a very limited number of site vulnerabilities, specifically wiretapping and man-in-the-middle type attacks – in other words, spying. It makes the NSA’s job of tracking and spying on internet users more difficult, but it doesn’t protect against hackers, denial-of-service attacks and scripting, server or database exploits.

Essentially, HTTPS is useful for sites that collect and transmit personal information. Banks, e-commerce sites, even social networks need to have HTTPS in place to make sure consumers’ sensitive information is protected.

For all the blogs, news sites, brand brochure-type sites or any information site that doesn’t require a member login, HTTPS is useless. It’s like the post office telling you to that all your mail needs to be written in secret code. That’s fine for the military, but do your Christmas greeting cards really need to be written in unbreakable secret code? Probably not. It’s just as pointless to require HTTPS on sites that do not transfer sensitive information.

That’s why it doesn’t make sense for Google to consider using HTTPS as a ranking signal for the majority of sites and queries. If used at all, it will always be a very lightweight signal used on a very narrow set of queries, acting only as a tie breaker between two identically ranked pages.

No, this announcement is not about search quality. It’s about Google trying to get back at the NSA for making it look bad during the PRISM scandal, and it is doing this under the guise of a social cause — internet privacy under the “HTTPS Everywhere” banner.

It’s a classic “greater good” story. Google says HTTPS will be a ranking signal so that everyone runs out and switches to HTTPS. What they’re not saying is that this change will only affect a minuscule number of sites. For everyone else, they’ve wasted time and energy switching to HTTPS for no reason – but that’s okay, because it serves the greater good of improving privacy for the internet as a whole.

What Should I Do?
What should you do about switching to HTTPS? When in doubt, do what’s best for users.

If you run a site in the e-commerce, financial, search, social networking or related fields, you should already be running HTTPS on it. In fact, if your site utilizes a member login or any type of shopping cart, you should really switch to HTTPS.

On the other hand, if you’re running a blog, brochure site, news site, or any sort of information site where users don’t provide you with any personal information, I would recommend not using HTTPS. It costs money; it takes resources to implement; it slows down your site; it’s not needed; and it won’t hurt your rankings.

Long story short: if you make the switch, do it for the users and not because Google said it’s a ranking signal, because it really isn’t.

HTTPS Sites Secure Ranking Boosts in Google

“We want to convince you that all communications should be secure by default.”

Those were the words uttered by Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far at the Google I/O event this summer, when he and a Google colleague talked “HTTPS everywhere.” And this week, Google Search is taking a very convincing stance on the matter: HTTPS is now a ranking signal in its algorithm.

From Google’s announcement:

Over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it's only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

On Google+, Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller answered questions from the community, like, "What if you have an informational site – does it apply to you, too?"

Mueller said this:

Some webmasters say they have "just a content site," like a blog, and that doesn't need to be secured. That misses out two immediate benefits you get as a site owner:

1. Data integrity: only by serving securely can you guarantee that someone is not altering how your content is received by your users. How many times have you accessed a site on an open network or from a hotel and got unexpected ads? This is a very visible manifestation of the issue, but it can be much more subtle.

2. Authentication: How can users trust that the site is really the one it says it is? Imagine you're a content site that gives financial or medical advice. If I operated such a site, I'd really want to tell my readers that the advice they're reading is genuinely mine and not someone else pretending to be me.

On top of these, your users get obvious (and not-so-obvious) benefits.

Moving a site from HTTP to HTTPS could have technical problems if not implemented carefully. Google gives tips on how to handle the move here.

And, in its help files, it also talks about best practices for setting up HTTPS, which include helping the search engines see the site as secure by following these tips (more details exist on the help page itself):

Redirect your users and search engines to the HTTPS page or resource with server-side 301 HTTP redirects.

Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain.

Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains or update your site links to link directly to the HTTPS resource.

Use a web server that supports HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) and make sure it's enabled.

If you have questions or concerns, Google is directing people to the Webmaster Help Forums. For example, this search for “HTTPS” in the forums pulls up several conversations already happening on the matter. The announcement said that in the coming weeks, Google would be publishing detailed best practices on this issue.