Google On Mobile Redirection: Now Use 301s, Not 302s
Back in June, Google updated their site moving documentation drastically but webmasters questioned why Google specifically recommended using 302 redirects to communicate separate smartphone URLs from desktop URLs. Well that has changed…
Twitter With Buy Buttons Within Tweets
Twitter announced they are getting into the e-commerce space with buy buttons in tweets.
Today we are beginning to test a new way for you to discover and buy products on Twitter. For a small percentage of U.S…
Google: Even After Algorithm Update, Your Rankings Changes May Not Be Immediately Visible
In response to our story on Google confirming a Penguin refresh is needed to recover from Penguin, Google’s John Mueller added more context to his answer in the Google Webmaster Help thread.
In short, he made a few important points…
Verify Analytics Accuracy With Google Webmaster Tools Top Pages
Especially when beginning an SEO engagement, it’s helpful to ensure tracking is as accurate as possible. Having the ability to compare analytics to external sources can give us something to point to when tracking doesn’t seem right.
Leo Tolstoy Google Logo Brings To Life The Author’s Classic Novels
Today’s Google logo is a an homage to Leo Tolstoy to mark the Russian author’s 186th birthday. The animated logo brings to life scenes from Tolstoy’s classic novels War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, along with stills of Tolstoy at his writing desk and…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
The Result of the Referendum on Scottish Independence will be ‘No’, says Bing
Bing predicts the votes on the Scottish Referendum using machine-learned models.
Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Digital
The Result of the Referendum on Scottish Independence will be ‘No’, says Bing
Google’s Current EU-Antitrust Settlement Appears Dead
Without immediate, new concessions from Google it appears that the company will not be able to finalize an antitrust settlement with the European Commission before antitrust chief Joaquin Almunía leaves office in November. It’s almost certain that a stronger Google critic will succeed him…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
The Big List of SEO Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS on Your Website
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
It’s rare that Google reveals any of its actual ranking factors, so it came as a big surprise when representatives
announced they would reward sites using HTTPS encryption with a boost in search results.
HTTPS isn’t like other ranking factors. Implementing it requires complexity, risks, and costs. Webmasters balance this out with benefits that include
increased security, better referral data, and a possible boost in rankings.
Google’s push for HTTPS adoption appears to be working. A recent Moz Poll found
24% of webmasters planning to make the switch.

SEO advantages of switching to HTTPS
In addition to the security offered by HTTPS (which we’ll discuss below) there are additional SEO benefits for marketers to take advantage of.
1. More referrer data
Whenever traffic passes from a secure HTTPS site to a non-secure HTTP site, the
referral data gets stripped away. This traffic shows up in your analytics report as ‘Direct.’ This is a problem because you don’t know where the traffic actually comes from.
If you use HTTP, traffic from sites like
Hacker News shows up as ‘direct’, because Hacker News uses HTTPS.
Fortunately, there’s a
simple solution: when traffic passes to an HTTPS site, the secure referral information is preserved. This holds true whether the original site uses HTTP or HTTPS.
As more and more sites make the switch, this becomes increasingly important.
2. HTTPS as a rankings boost
On one hand, Google has confirmed the ranking boost of HTTPS. On the other hand, with over 200 ranking, it’s likely you’ll find the effect of any ranking influence to
remain quiet small.
In fact, a recent study by Search Metrics showed
no detectable advantage to sites using HTTPS.
Like most ranking signals, it is very hard to isolate on its own.
In fact, don’t expect HTTPS to act as a silver bullet. If rankings are your only concern, there are likely
dozens of things you can do that will have a bigger impact. Here are several:
14 SEO activities more impactful than HTTPS:
3. Security and privacy
Many people argue that HTTPS only provides an advantage if your site uses sensitive passwords. That’s not exactly true. Even regular boring content websites can benefit from HTTPS / SSL encryption.
HTTPS adds security in several ways:
- HTTPS verifies that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to,
- Because HTTPS prevents tampering by 3rd parties, it stops Man-in-the-middle attacks, making your site more secure for visitors.
- HTTPS encrypts all communication, including URLs, which protects things like browsing history and credit card numbers.
My advice is this: Make the switch to HTTPS if doing so is reasonable for your business. Security and trust add to the small ranking gains, making it worth the effort if you can.
Challenges to overcome with HTTPS
1. Mistakes happen
Moving your entire site to HTTPS requires many moving parts. It’s easy to overlook important details.
- Did you block important URLs in robots.txt?
- Did you point your canonical tags at the wrong (HTTP) URL?
- Is your website causing browser bars to display warnings that frighten people away from your site? (Side note: That’s the very first article I wrote for SEOmoz!)
While rare, these problems do happen. Moz has spoken privately with webmasters who have seen both rankings and conversions plummet after implementing HTTPS.
In most cases it’s a simple fix, but beware the risk.
2. Speed issues
Because HTTPS requires extra communication “handshakes” between servers, it has the potential to slow down your website – especially on slower sites.
Add to this the fact that
speed is itself a ranking factor, especially on mobile.
The good news is, if you follow
best practices your site should be more than fast enough to handle HTTPS. New HTTPS friendly technologies like SPDY offer you the opportunity to speed up your website more than ever before.
3. Costs
Many webmasters pay between $100-200 a year for SSL certificates. That’s a significant amount for small websites. It’s also a barrier that most spammers won’t bother with.
On the other hand, it’s completely possible to
switch to HTTPS for free.
4. Not everything is ready for HTTPS
Sometimes, things don’t play well with HTTPS. Older web applications can have trouble with HTTPS URLs. (Fortunately, Moz updated
Open Site Explorer just this year.)
If you run AdSense, you may see
your earnings fall significantly, as Google will restrict your ads to those that are SSL-compliant.
Even Google’s own Webmaster Tools
doesn’t yet support HTTPS migration. The world may be moving toward 100% SSL encryption, but in the meantime be prepared for growing pains.
Growing number of sites using HTTPS
Lots and lots of sites use HTTPS today, but most restrict usage to checkout and registration pages.
Very, very few sites use HTTPS sitewide.
According to the latest statistics from
BuiltWith, only 4.2% of the top 10,000 websites redirect users to SSL/HTTPS by default. While that number appears small, the percentage drops to 1.9% for the top million sites.

This number is likely to increase in the very near future as more websites pursue adoption.
SEO and HTTPS best practices
This post talks about the
SEO implications of switching to HTTPS. If you are looking for a technical guide, there are several we’d recommend:
- Moving Your Website to HTTPS / SSL
- Switch to HTTPS Now, For Free
- HTTPS for WordPress
- How to Deploy HTTPS Correctly
What type of SSL certificate works best?
Companies offer a myriad and confusing array of SSL certificates. The two primary ones to pay attention to are:
- Standard Validation SSL – Standard level of validation. Typically cost between $0-$100.
- Extended Validation SSL – Offers the highest level of validation and often costs between $100-500.
From a rankings point of view, it makes
absolutely no difference what type of certificate you use. For now.
John Mueller of Google has stated that Google
doesn’t care what kind of SSL certificate your website uses, but that may change in the future.
From both a security and user experience point of view, the type of certificate you choose can have an impact. Consider how different certificates alter how your website appears in the web browser address bar.

The green bar associated with extended certificates communicates trust, while the warning symbols associated with errors can cause worry with visitors.
SEO checklist to preserve your rankings
- Make sure every element of your website uses HTTPS, including widgets, java script, CSS files, images and your content delivery network.
- Use 301 redirects to point all HTTP URLs to HTTPS. This is a no-brainer to most SEOs, but you’d be surprised how often a 302 (temporary) redirect finds its way to the homepage by accident
- Make sure all canonical tags point to the HTTPS version of the URL.
- Use relative URLs whenever possible.
- Rewrite hard-coded internal links (as many as is possible) to point to HTTPS. This is superior to pointing to the HTTP version and relying on 301 redirects.
- Register the HTTPS version in both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Use the Fetch and Render function in Webmaster Tools to ensure Google can properly crawl and render your site.
- Update your sitemaps to reflect the new URLs. Submit the new sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. Leave your old (HTTP) sitemaps in place for 30 days so search engines can crawl and “process” your 301 redirects.
- Update your robots.txt file. Add your new sitemaps to the file. Make sure your robots.txt doesn’t block any important pages.
- If necessary, update your analytics tracking code. Most modern Google Analytics tracking snippets already handle HTTPS, but older code may need a second look.
- Implement HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). This response header tells user agents to only access HTTPS pages even when directed to an HTTP page. This eliminates redirects, speeds up response time, and provides extra security.
Tips for FeedBurner and RSS
Many sites still use FeedBurner for RSS feeds. Unfortunately, Google stopped supporting it long ago and FeedBurner isn’t compatible with HTTPS.
If you use FeedBurner, you’ll need to migrate your RSS to an HTTPS-compatible service. If you’re technically competent you can do this yourself, or FeedPress has a
very inexpensive RSS migration solution.
Migrating social share counts
When migrating to HTTPS, you often want to preserve you social share counts. These are the numbers that display in social share buttons.
These counts don’t impact your rankings (as far as we know) but they act as strong social proof, and it’s frustrating to migrate a page with thousands of tweets and likes only to see them reset to zeros.

In fact, some social networks will transfer the social counts through their APIs, but it may take
weeks or months for them to show up correctly. Here’s a list of what does and doesn’t eventually transfer over:
- Facebook: Yes
- Twitter: No
- Google +1s: Yes
- Google shares: No
- LinkedIn: Yes
- Pinterest: No
If you want
instant karma, Mike King wrote an excellent tutorial on how to preserve your social share counts by altering the code of your social buttons. We used this method on Moz when we migrated from SEOmoz in order to preserve the counts on our content.
Example button codes to preserve social shares (edit for your site):

<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-send="false" data-layout="box_count" </div>

<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-counturl="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-url="https://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-count="vertical" data-via="moz">Tweet</a>

<div class="g-plusone" data-size="tall" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations"></div>
Keep in mind: This only displays
social shares from the URL you dictate. Because of this, it doesn’t update your counts with any new social shares. This works best with content like older blog posts that are likely not to get many new shares.
If you expect your content to continue to earn social activity, you may simply want to let the numbers update naturally over time.
Making the leap
Much of the web is now moving towards SSL encryption, and within a few years it may even become the default. SEOs, consultants and agencies that become experts know may be rewarded as the popularity of the protocol grows.
Will you make the switch to HTTPS?
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SearchCap: SEO Industry Survey, New AdWords Policy & Report On SEO Ranking Factors
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Industry Survey: 37% Of SEOs Saw Less Than $30,000 In Revenue Turnover Since Last Year According to an industry sur…
Why (& How) Your Non-Search Marketing Colleagues Should Attend SMX East
Hey Search Engine Land readers — you get search. You know how important it is. That’s why you’re here. That’s why many of you also come out to our SMX conferences that we organize, to keep up with search. But we also know you deal with folks who don’t live, breathe or…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
More Local SEOs Earning Less Than $30,000 [Study]
The BrightLocal Local SEO Industry Survey included nearly 1,800 SEOs and found more than a third of local SEOs have turnover of less than $30,000 and the average local SEO handles nine clients.
SearchMetrics Released SEO Ranking Factors For 2014: Content Now Really King?
SearchMetrics announced their 2014 SEO ranking factors study is now ready for download. Every year, SearchMetrics releases the study but this is the largest study they’ve done, with almost 100 pages and by adding dozens of new factors like time of site, bounce rate, fresh links and others….
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Launches Improved Sitelinks Search Box
Google announced a new way for users to search for site-specific content with an updated sitelinks search box and gave tips to developers for Schema markup to implement the feature well.
Webmaster Academy now available in 22 languages
Today, the new Webmaster Academy goes live in 22 languages! New or beginner webmasters speaking a multitude of languages can now learn the fundamentals of making a great site, providing an enjoyable user experience, and ranking well in search results. And if you think you’re already familiar with these topics, take the quizzes at the end of each module to prove it :).
So give Webmaster Academy a read in your preferred language and let us know in the comments or help forum what you think. We’ve gotten such great and helpful feedback after the English version launched this past March so we hope this straightforward and easy-to-read guide can be helpful (and fun!) to everyone.
Let’s get great sites and searchable content up and running around the world.
Posted by Mary Chen, Webmaster Outreach
Bing Ads Preview And Ad Diagnostics Tool: Now For Product And Mobile Ads
The Ad Preview and Diagnostics Tool in Bing Ads now allows advertisers to preview how their ads will look on mobile devices and find out why their product ads aren’t running. A new Product Ads tab in the tool includes a “reason for not showing” column with specific causes such as…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Optmyzr Launches Google Shopping Campaigns Setup Tool
There are many benefits of the new Shopping Campaigns structure that Google ushered in on September 1st, however, the setup process can be cumbersome and iterative, particularly if you have the same type of campaign structure across multiple campaigns….
9 Reasons You Should Be Using Display Advertising
There are many different platforms available to advertisers looking to take advantage of Display Advertising including Criteo, Ad Roll and Google itself. In this post, I am going to explain 9 different reasons why you should be taking advantage of Display Advertising and including it within your overall marketing strategy.
Post from Samantha Noble on State of Digital
9 Reasons You Should Be Using Display Advertising
Network with Your Marketing Peers at SMX East – Sept. 30 – Oct. 2 in NYC
We’ve already highlighted the exceptional content and highly qualified presenters at SMX East. But there’s another aspect of the show that is just as important and valuable – networking. And with well over 1000 companies sending delegates (so far), there are lots of people to connect…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Social Customer Service Secrets to Avoid Negative Search Results
Maintaining an effective strategy for customer service on social media will help to ensure that your brand doesn’t accrue any negative search results.
Bing Image Widget Now Offline After Getty Images Lawsuit
The Bing Image Widget that launched on August 22nd is now temporarily offline after Getty Images sued Microsoft over the feature. If you try to access the tool, you will be presented with a notice that the “Image Widget” has been “temporarily removed the beta.” Here is a…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
