How do the SERPs for commercial queries vary from the treatment of informational queries? Moz is about to publish its new Search Engine Ranking Factors, and was kind enough to provide me with access to their raw ranking data. Today I am going to share some of what I found.
In addition, I am going to compare it against raw ranking data pulled by my company, Stone Temple Consulting (STC). What makes this so interesting is that the Moz data is based on commercial queries across 165,177 pages and the STC data is based on informational queries over 182,340 pages (for a total of 347,517 result pages). Let's dive in!
Mobile-friendliness
Google rolled out their Mobile-Friendly Update on April 21 to much fanfare. We published our study results on how big that impact was here, and in that test, we tracked a set of 15,235 SERPs both before and after the SERPs.
The following chart shows the percentage of the top 10 results in the SERPs that are mobile friendly for the Moz (commercial) queries, and the STC informational queries before and after the mobile update:
Clearly, the commercial queries are returning a much larger percentage of mobile friendly results than the informational queries. Much of this may be due to it being more important to people running E-commerce sites to have a mobile-friendly site.
What this suggests to us is that publishers of E-commerce sites have been faster to adopt mobile friendliness than publishers of informational sites. That makes sense. Of course, our friends at Google know this is more important for commercial queries, too.
Your actionable takeaway
Regardless of query type, you can see that more than 60% of the results meet Google's current definition for mobile friendliness. For commercial queries, it's nearly 3/4 of them. Obviously, if you are not currently mobile friendly, then solve that, but that's not the whole story.
Over time, I believe that what is considered mobile friendly is going to change. The mobile world will become much more than just viewing your current desktop site with a smaller screen and a crappier keyboard. What are some more things you can expect in the long term?
- Different Site Architectures for Desktop and Mobile: I am of the opinion that the entire work flow may be different for many mobile sites.
- Voice navigation: We will stop seeing the keyboard as the primary navigation option for a mobile site.
- Continuing Rise of Apps: The prior two points may be a large factor in driving this.
My third point is an item that is already in progress, and the first two are really not for most people at this time. However, I put them out there to stimulate some thinking that much more is going to happen in this space than meets the eye. In the short term, what can you do?
My suggestion is that you start looking at the mobile version of your site as more than a different rendering of your desktop site. What are the different use cases between mobile and desktop? Consider running two surveys of your users, one of desktop users and one of smartphone users, and ask them what they are looking for, and what they would like to see. My bet is that you will quickly see that the use cases are different in material ways.
In the near term, you can leverage this information to make your mobile site optimization work better for users, probably without re-architecting it entirely. In the longer term, collecting this type of data will prepare you for considering more radical design differences between your desktop and mobile sites.
HTTP vs. HTTPS
Another one of the newer ranking factors is whether or not a site uses HTTPS. Just this past July 22, Google's Gary Illyes clarified again that this is a minor ranking signal that acts like a tiebreaker in cases where the ranking for two competing pages are "more or less equal."
How has that played out in the SERPs? Let's take a look:
As with the mobile-friendliness, we once again see the commercial queries placing significantly more emphasis on this factor than the informational queries. Yet, the penetration levels are clearly far lower than they are for mobile friendliness. So should I care about this then?
Yes, it matters. Here are three reasons why:
- At SMX Advanced, Google's Gary Illyes indicated at SMX Advanced that they plan to increase the strength of HTTPS as a ranking factor over time.
- Google's Chrome is making moves toward warning users visiting unsecure web sites.
- Mozilla has also laid plans to follow suit.
Yes, I know there is much debate about whether or not you need to have HTTPS if all you are doing is running a content site. But a lot of big players out there are taking a simple stance: that it's time for the plain text web to come to an end.
The big thing that HTTPS helps prevent is Man in the Middle Attacks. Do read the linked article if you don't know what that is. Basically though, when you communicate with a non-secure web site, it's pretty trivial for someone to intercept the communication and monitor or alter the information flow between you and the sending web site.
The most trivial form of this can occur any time you connect to a third party Wifi connection. People can inject ads you don't want, or simply monitor everything you do and build a profile about you. Is that what you want?
Let me offer a simple example: Have you ever connected to Wifi in a hotel? What's the first thing that happens? You try to go to a website, but instead you get a login screen asking for your room number and last name to sign in - and most times they charge you some fee.
That's the concept - you tried to go to a web site, and instead got served different content (the Wifi login screen). The hotel can do this at any time. Even after you login and pay their fee, they can intercept your communication with other web sites and modify the content. A simple application for this it to inject ads. They can also monitor and keep a record of every site you visit. They can do this because they are in the middle.
In an HTTPS world, they will still be able to intercept the initial connection, but once you are connected, they will no longer be able to see inside the content going back and forth between you and the https websites you choose to access.
Your actionable takeaway
Eventually, the plain text web will come to an end. As this movement grows, more and more publishers will make the switch to HTTPS, and Google will dial up the strength of this signal as a ranking factor. If you have not made the switch, then get it into your longer term plans.
Summary
Both mobile-friendliness and HTTPS support appear to matter more to commercial sites today. I tend to think that this is more a result of more e-commerce site publishers and informational site publishers have made the conversions, rather than it being the impact of the related Google algorithms. Regardless of that, the importance of both of these factors will grow, and it would be wise to aggressively prepare for the future.
HTTPS will be rise with following mass deploying of HTTP/2 where encryption is enabled by-default and can't be excluded. For now Apache just get mod_h2 in trunk and nginx make "early alpha" of this too. Once they are up and working nothing can stop HTTP/2 and HTTPS rising in SERP results.
For mobile versions... mine opinion is that you don't need just one "mobile" version that comes with RWD (responsive web design). If you need fully mobile feature rich website you need AWD (adaptive web design). All big brands (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) comes with few mobile websites dependents from your user agent. Since they're quiet about that we can use Guardian experience in AWD described here. Only major cons of AWD are costs - infrastructure, development and deployment.
Peter, I'm a some kind of dinosaur but I prefer mobile versions of the web-sites. They are so lightweight, code is clear and nothing additional is loaded - check https://ideabg.com/bg/m/ for example and we will talk again :)
Hi, Eric
Sounds great, completely agree with Mobile-friendliness point. While http-https, as of now, I don't think/feel that it has any major indication for rankings. However it will for sure, because of security propose, you have indicate really important point of "Man/Women in the Middle Attacks".
Switching is also a risky factor if you don't do it properly. To have it, site owners can secure only their payment gateway pages with https if they don't want to switch the complete site. So only some pages will get SSL and thus pages like registration,payment,account and many other pages with active forms can be secured for the users.
I really can't agree to: "different site architecture for mobile and desktop." I think that is a dead-end a lot of (news) sites are runing into. I'm seeing an app, a web.app and a none-responsive but possibly mobile friendly website. Now no matter your budget and no matter the skills of your product-manager(s), you will always be lagging behind on some end (or facing the most horrible releace cycle) and thus frustrating users.
Showing different content on different devices is, i think, the worst mistake you can make. If you can cut it on mobile you can cut it on desktop. If it's needed on desktop, it's needed on mobile. If the app needs it, why not the browser version?
So i'll say - if you built something then go for a fully responsive website that really focuses on the mobile experience (Peter Nikolow called it AWD above). Stop the web-app stuff on subdomains or funneling insane amounts of marketing budget to get people installing ur more than useless app. That might work if u are the Guardian or the NYT, Facebook or Google, but certainly not for ur small blogger or e-commerce site around the corner. And to be quite frank i'd be curious about the hard data of all those apps from major news sites as well. Especially since even they are hard to discover.
So all in all, i couldn't agree less with the "Continuing Rise of Apps" (other than SM, search, photography and games) nor the need to create different sites architectures for mobile. Both from a budget point of view as well as from a UX point of view.
Agreed that the world of apps is a tough one for the average small business. This could lead to some major challenges in coming years though, as people are adapting new devices and demanding new use cases for the information they want on those devices, and the form in which they want to consume it.
This could really put some serious additional pressure on those small businesses, if larger ones can satisfy those use cases, and the smaller ones cannot.
Hi Eric,
I also disagree about "the continued rise of apps", outside of frequently used utilities (FB, GMaps, etc) and games.
Outside of these use cases, which everyone fixates on, mobile app usage metrics are shockingly bad.
That's not to say that apps don't have some substantial benefits - offline access, push notifications, etc.
But the web will be rapidly approaching parity in these areas, with new polyfills like ServiceWorker, which gives your web apps most of the functionality you associate with mobile apps - offline access, push notifications, etc. You get "app-like" behavior, but with all the benefits of the open web, and without forcing unwanted app downloads on your users.
For businesses, it's very important to keep an eye on long-term growth strategy, rather than chasing the newest, shiniest thing (which seems to be apps these days).
As you and I know, for most businesses, the single online channel with the greatest potential for growth is organic search. Investing money in SEO, responsive web design and web performance has a far greater potential to help most businesses grow, than investing an equal number of dollars in a mobile app.
I don't see the real benefit of switching to https right now if you are running an informational site on relatively low budget - which is what the majority of the web consists of. Https adds a bit to the load time, adds a little extra cost to your annual fees, and is technically a little overwhelming for your standard bloggers and site managers. As someone already commented, it will also have an immediate negative affect on SEO. So the risks right now in making that switch are quite off-putting.
Fair point. Https might be beneficial where website stores users information in their database. For Google priority could be that all user information should be secured, if you are securing your user information, its a plus for you, as this might be considered one small step towards building a trusted website.
If you are only serving content for reading, and users are not required to logged in to consume your content, you don't need to migrate to https.
I agree that there are challenges, costs, and risks, but Google believes that the entire web will eventually operate over HTTPS.
I know this was posted a few days ago but this sort of misinformation is the only remaining challenge of HTTPS.
Cost: Scales with value, so if you only have an informational site it's actually currently FREE to get a signed certificate.
Load time: Can actually IMPROVE performance (https://istlsfastyet.com/)
Negative effect on SEO: It could do depending on how you implement it but most people have only seen at most a couple of days decrease before rankings recovered. This is the only place that the risk exists.
And finally, why should you do it?
If you collect any data from your users (even if its just email) it is absolutely a requirement - that data can be stolen at any point if you do not use HTTPS
If you serve ad's, some ISP's will serve their own adverts over your own which affects your revenue. HTTPS prevents this
It's a really irksome issue with me as people pushing back on HTTPS are putting their users data at risk and their strongest argument is usually that it could cause some drop in traffic.
Insightful read.. Interesting to see people are still reluctant to move on https may be because of the technical issues and the expected ranking and traffic drop. You're right, E-Commerce sites should think from the user's perspective rather from the search engines as switching to HTTPS and Mobile is actually good for their customers.
Looking forward for the Moz's report.
Thanks for the preview.
There are pros and cons when switching to HTTPS, however it should not be a big deal if you know your priority.
Well Peter switching to https is kind of a big deal, and can significantly drop your organic traffi, plus you would need to work hard to restore the linking websites/ social shares to the https version which is most likely the toughest thing to do and you most probably loose a good amount of link equity (even in the case of a 301 redirect).
That's very interesting, and made me think..
At first - I thought the web going https woudl be a complete pain - because https has always been extra setup, extra cost, and slightly slower response..
But actually - if I ask myself whether we should have more privacy on the web, then of course I say yes. if I'd prefer communication encrypted instead of clear text - of course that's better because it's safer and more private.
Which is what https does..
As long as the process becomes easier, and site speed isn't negatively impacted, I think https is for sure the way it is going..
Thanks Eric
To discuss the value of HTTPS as a tiebreaker, we would need to know how many of these 'ties' occur for a typical search query.
Fair point :)
Exactly. In addition, https ratio can be totally different depending on the subject area.
Everything makes sense considering the population of people having access to the internet will continue to rise. The whole point of this article is to invest time and money to keep your website improving. If you don't have the budget today, you should include it to your long term business goal.
There are pros and cons when switching to HTTPS, however it should not be a big deal if you know your priority. Sacrificing to gain is not something new.
I totally agree that mobile friendliness is very import for websites moving forward. However, I find it interesting that many people are essentially saying to ditch responsiveness and go back to the separate mobile and desktop sites. That also creates problems for Google ranking as it can be seen as a separate site: example.com vs. m.example.com
For most informational sites responsive design should be sufficient. But I think the best option for sites that see a large difference in how mobile users use their site is AWD because it addresses the changes in use between desktop and mobile, but does not create two sites.
Bryan - I agree on AWD as a solid direction for a mobile strategy. The 2 use cases can be quite different!
Interesting read! I was actually expecting the https website's percentage to be a lot higher but as its growing it might take a bit more time for people to switch to secure versions of the website.
Making the switch to https is tricky! The loss in link value by creating 301 redirects often does not make up for the value gained by the switch. Also, link referral information in Google Analytics can be thrown off by the not provided secure hostname. It may be better to make the switch sooner rather than later, if sites will have to in order to stay competitive with Google. I'd love to hear more about what to look out for with SEO in making this transition.
Thank you, Eric!! Very precious things!
But ... people from Google say /I don't remember the source/ that - show us a single url with SSL from your web -site and we see that you are using ssl. In this direction - I think - it's beter to use SSL only in the sensitive parts of the web-site - payments, personal info , login, register, but not in the index, product and info pages? :) Got it? :)
Hi Borislav - Google disagrees! They want the whole web to go HTTPS, and they believe that it will. If they are right, this will go up over time as a ranking factor.
Thank you, Eric! OK, but .. if the whole web goes https ... it will become standard, and how they will recognize the sites with more security and safety? :) It's like the question - what is first - the egg or the hen :)
We all know that the "whole" web will never be HTTPS to many spam/bad sites so they will be able to tell the difference. its like the previous post from Mr. Lurie about Distance from Perfect the best you can do is get close to perfect and hope your competitors don't do the same.
Very Interesting Read. Never thought that https is one of SERPs indication. Hoping more people will switch to https in future.
Insightful read.. Interesting to see people are still reluctant to move on https may be because of the technical issues and the expected ranking and traffic drop. You're right, E-Commerce sites should think from the user's perspective rather from the search engines as switching to HTTPS and Mobile is actually good for their customers.
I would like to read a deep article that compares Moz and Searchmetrics ranking factor, I'm curious about what is in common and what's not. Correlations of correlations must be something :D
The https factor is surely be playing a dominant role in the future, but it is going to take some time for a majority of websites to switch to it.
Nice Eric!!!
Thank you for the outstanding article .. Mobile-friendliness will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices
Great article which mostly affirms what we would expect, yet it's always good that someone does the leg work to verify (so we can avoid surprises).
Voice navigation for mobile is an entire article of its own, don't you think? How about the misspellings of the voice recognition software in translated search queries? Not only that, but this opens up the entire range of optimization techniques for anthropomorphism in search ("how do I" ... "find me the closest" ... "what is the" ...).
We type queries into a search box based on years of feedback, but we speak into smartphones like we would query a friendly robot, or even just a human friend.
I suspect voice command search could be more disruptive than the evaporation of text ... time will tell.
I agree with Rafael. I also think it will be more trusted and penalize not think so .
so mobile friendly site are higher in google? Does matter if website is free or commercial ? I noticed that online shops on higher postions? And what about adult tube
What people were expecting that It will be a great change that will impact Google ranking enormously after moving HTTP to HTTPS. But there was a inconsequential change till now. So now what you are expecting in future?
If Google is right, and HTTPS penetration does go way up, then not being HTTPS-compliant may become a larger ranking factor. But, it will remain small for now.
Yeah, it is an undeniable factor. But as we know the switching is not that easy, it is also risky factor if we do not apply is in a proper manner. Some Canonical Issues might make other problems as well. But as the mobile users are being increasing significantly, it simply means that all the site must have to fulfill the mobile user's needs.
Agree HTTPS will impact rankings. Shame you can't notify change of address (Http to Https) in Webmaster tools and only change of web address.
Agree there could be some risk. However, if a client is going to rebrand the site (Switch URL) then the right way would to use HTTPS from the beginning, and then make proper 301's.
We have seen a client, where the name switch actually increased SERPS after migration. Which was far better than what we had hoped for.
I am hoping to see https a big factor for SEO rankings, as this in a way says that website is more secure, and compared to http version. We migrated from http to https hoping that this will help us in SEO, as of now, results are not that, we lost our organic traffic by 10%, but I am hoping that it will recover and will ultimately help in SEO. There is no short term game in SEO, play it for long run.
I agree there is a great fact to addapt websites to mobile context, but there's still some clients who don't want to change their "effective" ones.
If Google wants to display the best possible information. It wouldn't be a stretch to think that they would also want to display the information in the safest possible manner. So then HTTPs would play a factor in the rankings for now and possibly forever.
Thank you, for the data!
Hello,
After reading this blog i feeling like https is a big factor for SEO rankings, as this is the unique way for website secure.
As per my understanding, HTTP vs. HTTPS don't have any rankings aspects but to get an stable ranking, website must be secure and HTTPS is an important part to get stability in ranking terms. But i must say, Eric Enge, you have done a good job as this post is quite different from other traditional SEO and Online Marketing Articles. Its really helpful to get update yourself by reading such stuffs..
I can only see mobile platforms becoming ever more important as a ranking factor, so rather start today than tomorrow working on a user friendly site.
Hello Eric,
As usual interesting post, I want to add one point here, specially for those who will make decision to switch http to https. If you are in google penalty and you think that switching http to https could be better option to rank well then please don't do until you come out from penalty. Because, google may think that you are trying to escape the penalty and then it will become very hard to come out from.
You really helped me with your answer, i got penalised short time ago and I was thinking about doing that.
Thank you to prevent me :-P
Thanks Mathias, it is always good to be original and never hide our mistakes. Google giving chance to come out from the penalty, so do the needful, remove penalty then switch to https, it will definitely help.
Hello, Mathias
I am completely agreed with Ragael Deramas, If you are facing Google penalty means there is a problem. Google It self wants you to come out of the penalty and asking you to take important steps, if you make significant changes for penalty removal, Google will appreciate it. I assume you already took necessary steps. If not , Remove all the bad links pointing to your site , disavow others which are not in your control. Switching to https could be one of the plus point for your website improvement.
Other points is , switching to https may be tricky, but as you are already facing the penalty , there is nothing to lose, so I think,. This is the best time to do it. If you are thinking to switch in the near future, do it now.
I believe that as of now, https is not major indication for rankings. however Keep in mind that, https is the ranking signal, Google wants you to accept it soon or later. There is not any condition that you cant switch to https while having any penalty. If Google thinks that you are trying to come out of the penalty, what is wrong in that?. Even Google wants you to come out from the penalty. At least you are trying to improve your website for your visitors. Switching to https will drop your traffic for some time as per my experience, but in the long run it makes your site more trustworthy it self. Best of luck.
Hello Vishal,
You may never make fool to google, if you think that you did spam and you get penalized by google and rather than removing bad links or clearing spam, if you switch to https then your all problem will be solved then you might on the wrong track.
You will never rank in google, The thing is, if you want to stay in google eye, so you must have to remove penalty first then you can think about the second option. If switching to https is the best option to come out from penalty then there are numbers of websites which got penalized by google algorithms and they can take this shortcut.
There is no shortcut way buddy, if you get penalized by google then you must have to remove spam otherwise everyone will start the same i.e- "START SPAM, when get penalized then switch to https ". This is not an authentic way..
Hope, this would clear your doubt.
Hey Shubham,
Whooo , First, please read the comment carefully, I never said, "START SPAM, when get penalized then switch to https " , As I said "I assume you already took necessary steps. If not , Remove all the bad links pointing to your site , disavow others which are not in your control. Switching to https could be one of the plus point for your website improvement."
I never said that "switching is best option to come out from the penalty" OR "You can make fool to google". Switching is one of the step for website improvement.The Point was There is no condition that you can't switch to https while having penalty, there are hundreds of other factors as well which can get your website down. Its not a doubt, its a fact. Have a nice day :)
Hello Vishal,
I always read twice to make sure if everything correct. And there is no end to remove penalty from the website. If you do all the necessary things to remove penalty then your penalty will definitely be removed. Because, google penalized only if you do anythings against google guidelines. Let me share one more example of truth -
https://www.branded3.com/blog/seo-considerations-m...
Read this article carefully if you can and let me know what you understand. And please don't say that you are still no agree with Stuart Long too. I hope, now this topic will be finished. Have a great day :)
Hello Shubham,
You are mentioning the same thing which I already have said. Again, I am repeating I Never said , "switching is best option to come out from the penalty" OR "You can make a fool to Google." Yes, I am not agreed with Stuart too ,Even He is not sure either that how Google will treat. As far as its not have done practically, How can we say it will effect the site permanently. No one is sure how Google treat your webpages. Point is, Instead of waiting for another algorithm update, You should start improving your website, building quality links, creating amazing user experience, making your visitors more safe. Maybe someday, we should meet in person and discuss all this over a coffee. :)
Now you are little bit on the line, never wait for another penalty but if you are already penalized then there is nothing to loose. And yes, Stuart is sure on what he wrote and he is right too. Sometimes we can be wrong Vishal, hope you don't think everyone is wrong.
Yep, I am really excited to have coffee with you.. BDW, its always good to discuss more and more on a topic, because the chances increase to learn new things :)
I disagree with you on this. When Google detects that you switched from http to https, it will think that you are making your site more trustworthy, thus getting you out of penalty. Google wouldn't likely penalize you for attempting to improve your website.
Hello Refael,
I appreciate your thoughts, but if we remove penalty first then switch to https that make sense. Because, we should always come out from our first mistake, otherwise Google will take it negatively.
If you have penalty on the site and you really want to improve then there are many ways, so first remove penalty, make your site trustworthy and then switch to https. Hope you understand.
Mobile friendliness and if a site uses HTTPS are the newer ranking factors. I think that if you want a https website you can fall in the mistake of duplicate content so you should be careful when you do it.