Getting A More Secure Internet?
- 12 May 2023
- Blog
What’s all the fuss about?
As announced in early September, Google are pushing security through their chrome browser and search algorithm with HTTPS.
According to Google:
Google have been trying to get people using HTTPS for a while now. They have been telling us since 2014 that if given a choice between a website that uses HTTPS and one that doesn’t they will rank the one with HTTPS higher in the search results. So using HTTPS should give websites a higher ranking. This has encouraged many businesses to use HTTPS, Google are now trying to force it on people by issuing warnings through their Chrome browser.
HTTPS will give your site more security if you have sign in areas or e -commerce. An easy way to check the status of your website is to just take a look at the address bar, if your website has HTTPS you should see that part of the address is green and says HTTPS as illustrated in the picture below:
So why are we telling you about it.
The Google Analytics Referrals report is very straightforward. It will list all traffic that has come to your site from:
Non-search engine websites
Links to your site in which referral was not overwritten as the campaign source
Sadly, some of your referral traffic might be missing from your Referrals report, and this could have an impact on your numbers and ability to optimize based on referrals, it is important to know how your referral information is affected. Google Analytics will populate your Referral report based on referral information in the HTTP header.
What if the referral information is missing from the page request? This is actually the case for default HTTPS-to-HTTP (secure-to-non-secure) links.
If the pages on your website are only accessed through HTTPS protocol, you won’t be losing any referral info, since referral loss can happen when the visitor comes from an HTTPS page, not to an HTTPS page. If, on the other hand, your pages are accessed through http, you can quickly survey the number of the secure inbound links by performing a Google search which will show inbound links to your domain that contain HTTPS.
What can you do about it?
As of January 2017 Find the Needle are 100% secure. We have thousands of listings that are now covered by HTTPS. Take a look at what we can do for you here at:
https://www.findtheneedle.co.uk/
All the business listings we build at Find the Needle are HTTPS secure immediately. We are more than happy to give you advice on how you can make your own website secure using the new HTTPS web link, or even improve your ranking in Google using our expertise in search engine optimization.
