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Yelp Being Sued in San Francisco Courts for Misleading Investors

Mike Blumenthal

Gigaom reports that there is a new class action suit against Yelp for security law violations: The complaint alleges Yelp violated securities law by committing “fraud on the market,” and claims that executive sold stock when the price was near a high of almost $90 in February; the price fell sharply shortly after this in light of the negative […]

advanced beginner Google Webmaster Blog https intermediate search results security Uncategorized

HTTPS as a ranking signal

Google Webmaster Central

Webmaster level: all

Security is a top priority for Google. We invest a lot in making sure that our services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google.

Beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.

We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web.

We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging.

For these reasons, 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.

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In the coming weeks, we’ll publish detailed best practices (we’ll add a link to it from here) to make TLS adoption easier, and to avoid common mistakes. Here are some basic tips to get started:

  • Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
  • Use 2048-bit key certificates
  • Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
  • Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
  • Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
  • Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
  • Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

If your website is already serving on HTTPS, you can test its security level and configuration with the Qualys Lab tool. If you are concerned about TLS and your site’s performance, have a look at Is TLS fast yet?. And of course, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to post in our Webmaster Help Forums.

We hope to see more websites using HTTPS in the future. Let’s all make the web more secure!

Posted by Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analysts

Channel: SEO Google: SEO Google: Web Search Search Engine Land Top News Uncategorized

Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites

Barry Schwartz

Google To Give Secure Sites A Ranking Boost Google has announced (the blog post hasn’t gone live yet, actually) that going HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site — will give you a minor ranking boost. Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit,…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

7 Empowering Presentations and More from MozCon

EricaMcGillivray

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

At the MozPlex, we’re all still coming down from the incredible energy, excitement, and new ideas that MozCon brings every year. Thank you again to all of you who joined us to make this year’s MozCon the best ever. For those of you who couldn’t join us, we wanted to share some of the best slide decks from MozCon (videos coming next month!) and also share 
downloads for all the decks from MozCon.

Additionally, for those planning ahead, make sure to buy your early bird ticket for MozCon 2015. We expect to sell out again, so grab this great deal now!

Mad Science Experiments in SEO & Social Media

by Rand Fishkin

Rand’s put on his lab coat, literally, and dived into SEO and social media experiments. He looked at the correlations and causations for everything from how rapid tweeting of photos affects follower gains/losses to how clicks might influence SERPs.

You are So Much More than an SEO

by Wil Reynolds

Wil once again brought his A-game and his push that SEO is a growing field and we SEOs must grow with it. He brings us all together in a presentation exploring how with our colleagues in other marketing disciplines, we’re failing to capture business for our brand or clients.

Bad Data, Bad Decisions: The Art of Asking Better Questions

by Stephanie Beadell

Stephanie taught us how to think about the questions we ask in surveys differently. Are we biasing our audience and leading them to answering our survey in a certain way? Are we collecting the wrong types of data?

YouTube: The Most Important Search Engine You Haven’t Optimized For

by Phil Nottingham

Phil brought his video expertise back to the MozCon stage. This year, he tackled YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine, but one often ignored by marketers. Phil puts you on track to stop being befuddled and make a YouTube plan for your brand.

How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas

by Dr. Pete Meyers

Pete surprised everyone this by talking about not the Google Algo. Instead, he dove into one of his other passions: creating great content. Pete shows you how to be brave and build out your big idea.

Scaling Creativity: Making Content Marketing More Efficient

by Stacey (Cavanagh) MacNaught

Stacey’s presentation followed up Pete by diving into how to make the content process happen, especially if you have multiple clients or work at an agency. She addressed how to find the right audience for your content. And then how to throw all your ideas on the table and sort out the best ones.

How to Use Social Science to Build Addictive Communities

by Richard Millington

Rich believes in the power of communities. He walked the MozCon audience through how to build up a community through shared experiences and rituals. Rich also showed how to make a business case for community building.

Can’t get enough MozCon decks?
You can download all of them in the Agenda section on the MozCon page.

Buy Your MozCon 2015 Ticket!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Channel: Industry Google: Business Issues Google: Employees Search Engine Land Top News Uncategorized

Google Management Lessons Book Coming From Eric Schmidt

Greg Sterling

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and former Google SVP Jonathan Rosenberg have written a new book called How Google Works. Not yet published but available for pre-order, it’s a wide-ranging discussion of corporate management drawing upon the lessons the two men learned over a decade at…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Channel: SearchCap Search Engine Land SearchCap Uncategorized

SearchCap: Google+ Authorship, Bing Mobile Problem & The New Foursquare App

Barry Schwartz

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: “Right To Be Forgotten” To Blame For Removal Of 50 Wikipedia Links From EU Search Results According to a release today from the Wikimedia Foundation,…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.