Topic: HTTP

SearchCap: Google On HTTPS, Apple & Google Deal & Bing With NCAA

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Patrick Pichette, Google’s CFO To Retire Google’s long term CFO has told the company he wants to retire over the next six months but will help the company find a replacement. […]

Google Webmaster Tools Index Status Showing Data For HTTPS Protocol

Google has announced they’ve added “more precise” data for the Index Status reports in Google Webmaster Tools. Specifically, Google is now reporting each indexed URLs for each protocol, specifically both for HTTP and HTTPS, as well as for verified subdirectories. Google said this change “makes it easy for you to monitor different sections of your […]

Google To Replace Smartphone User-Agent To Improve Smart Phone Indexing

Google announced they are replacing the old smartphone crawler user-agent with a new one in order to make it possible for Google to index more smartphone content. Zhijian He, a smartphone search engineer at Google said that the previous user-agent “made it impossible for Google to index smartphone content of some sites, or for Google […]

An Easy Way To Check What Referrer Data Google, Bing Or Yahoo Pass To Your Secure Site

With the three major search engines migrating their default searches to secure search, over SSL/HTTPS, marketers and webmasters want to know what referrer and analytics data will be passed to them and what won’t. The majority of Google is secure search, Yahoo yesterday defaulted all searches to be conducted over SSL, and Bing is currently […]

The Definitive Guide To Technical Mobile SEO

At SMX Advanced, I moderated a panel about technical SEO. Google’s Maile Ohye spoke about SEO best practices for technical implementation of mobile sites based on how Google crawls, indexed, and ranks mobile content and presents it to searchers on mobile devices. She also talked about Google’s recent announcement that the mobile user experience is […]

Mobile Site Configuration & The Vary HTTP Header

Yesterday, Google announced more changes to the Google mobile search algorithm, which we can expect to roll out shortly. This update is intended to improve the search experience for mobile users by “address[ing] sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users” — presumably by improving mobile rankings for sites that have been optimized according to their […]

SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 30, 2012

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Adds Medications To Its Knowledge Graph Searchers in need of medical information will begin seeing detailed information on medications as part of Google’s Knowledge Graph product. In today’s announcement, Google […]

Google: Want To Switch To HTTPS? Go Ahead!

Google’s Matt Cutts said on a Hacker News comment that those who are interested in switching their whole web site from http to https should go ahead and do that. I spotted this comment in response to Facebook going HTTPS by default, where someone mentioned that Google may have an issue indexing HTTPS content. Matt […]

Safari Shifts To Google Secure Search in iOS 6, Causing Search Referrer Data To Disappear

Another source of Google search referrer data appears lost. Searches through Google that happen in Apple’s Safari browser search box in iOS 6, Apple’s latest mobile operating system, no longer pass along search terms to publishers. For those unfamiliar, “referrer” data is information a browser passes along to a publisher about the last page you were […]

Firefox 14 Now Encrypts Google Searches, But Search Terms Still Will “Leak” Out

Firefox 14 has officially launched today, which means all Google searches are encrypted by default. However, due to a Google loophole, the encryption will not prevent things you search for from “leaking” out to Google’s advertisers nor potentially showing up as search suggestions or in data reported to web sites through Google Webmaster Central. The Firefox […]

How Microsoft Removes “Junk” From Bing Search Results

Dr. Richard Qian from Bing’s core search team wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Bing Search Quality Insights: Reducing Junk. This is part of Bing’s ongoing effort to provide search quality insights on how Bing works. Bing here explains how they handle removing bad links from the Bing search results, and […]

How Twitter’s Technical Infrastructure Issues Are Impacting Google Search Results

In the last few days, several noticed that the Google Toolbar PageRank value for www.twitter.com had plummeted to 0 (it’s now back to its previous 9). Was Google punishing Twitter for how things went down with the feed expiration that temporarily derailed Google’s Realtime search efforts? Nah, Twitter’s website has just been suffering from technical […]

Google: rel=”canonical” Now Supported In HTTP Headers

Google announced they are now supporting the rel=”canonical” attribute within HTTP headers. This enables webmasters to set up a canonical for linking to or from PDF files or other non-HTML based files. One of the examples given by Google is that a “webmaster can signal to Google that the canonical URL for the PDF download […]

Upstart DuckDuckGo Challenges Google With Strong Privacy, Cool Tools & Quackpot Name

Here at Search Engine Land we regularly hear from people who have created “radical,” innovative,” “next generation” search technology, promising to “fix” the “broken” search we all allegedly pitifully struggle with today. In virtually every instance that I can remember, these promises over-hype and under-deliver, rarely offering something that becomes part of my regular search […]

Google Web Report: Average Page Size 320 KB

Google released a report on general statistics of web pages on the Internet. The report lists basic information they retrieved over the course of “Google’s crawl and indexing pipeline.” The key highlights include: The average web page takes up 320 KB on the wire. Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually […]

OpenOffice.org Is MIA In Bing, But It’s Not Censorship

The home page of OpenOffice.org, the well-known Microsoft Office competitor, is missing from Microsoft’s Bing search engine. While it sounds suspicious, the problem has nothing to do with Bing itself — it’s a technical problem on OpenOffice.org’s end. Ian McAnerin noticed earlier today that OpenOffice.org doesn’t show up in Bing on searches for [open office] […]

MSNbot 1.1: Live Search Implements A More Efficient Crawl

Today, Microsoft announced changes to their Live Search crawler intended to reduce bandwidth resources during the crawl of a site. MSNbot (upgraded to version 1.1) now supports both HTTP compression and conditional get. The post on the Live Search Webmaster Center blog describes each feature in detail and includes links to tools you can use […]