HTTP Compression -- Any potential issues with doing this?
-
We are thinking about turning on the IIS-6 HTTP Compression to help with page load times. Has anyone had any issues with doing this, particularly from an SEO or site functionality standpoint? We just want to double check before we take this step and see if there are any potential pitfalls we may not be aware of. Everything we've read seems to indicate it can only yield positive results.
Any thoughts, advice, comments would be appreciated.
Thank-you,
Matt & Keith
-
Thanks.
-
Thanks.
-
I am aware that IE6 is old and many sites have dropped support for it. It's usage will vary by market. If the fix required 10 minutes of your time, you wouldn't do that for 1% or more of your potential customers?
If you have any Chinese users for instance, you'd want to make it work. Or if you're targeting people who are less tech-savvy or older in age, your IE6 usage numbers are bound to be higher. I agree that for most sites, it's probably not a huge issue. Since I experienced it on our site, I thought I'd mention it. If there is an issue, there is also likely a published fix that would require minimal effort.
-
You do realize that Microsoft has been trying to kill IE6 off, and just recently celebrated IE6 usage in the US dropping below 1%, right?
I wouldn't consider IE6 in your business plans.
-
Once you implement it, I'd check is that Internet Explorer 6 likes it. I can't remember the details, but when we added compression on our site, there were instances where IE6 didn't like it.
-
According to Google's Webmaster blog, Googlebot supports gzip and deflate
Googlebot: Sure. All major search engines and web browsers support gzip compression for content to save bandwidth. Other entries that you might see here include "x-gzip" (the same as "gzip"), "deflate" (which we also support), and "identity" (none).An incompatible compression would be the only downside to turning on compression.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Forced Redirects/HTTP<>HTTPS 301 Question
Hi All, Sorry for what's about to be a long-ish question, but tl;dr: Has anyone else had experience with a 301 redirect at the server level between HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site in order to maintain accurate social media share counts? This is new to me and I'm wondering how common it is. I'm having issues with this forced redirect between HTTP/HTTPS as outlined below and am struggling to find any information that will help me to troubleshoot this or better understand the situation. If anyone has any recommendations for things to try or sources to read up on, I'd appreciate it. I'm especially concerned about any issues that this may be causing at the SEO level and the known-unknowns. A magazine I work for recently relaunched after switching platforms from Atavist to Newspack (which is run via WordPress). Since then, we've been having some issues with 301s, but they relate to new stories that are native to our new platform/CMS and have had zero URL changes. We've always used HTTPS. Basically, the preview for any post we make linking to the new site, including these new (non-migrated pages) on Facebook previews as a 301 in the title and with no image. This also overrides the social media metadata we set through Yoast Premium. I ran some of the links through the Facebook debugger and it appears that Facebook is reading these links to our site (using https) as redirects to http that then redirect to https. I was told by our tech support person on Newspack's team that this is intentional, so that Facebook will maintain accurate share counts versus separate share counts for http/https, however this forced redirect seems to be failing if we can't post our links with any metadata. (The only way to reliably fix is by adding a query parameter to each URL which, obviously, still gives us inaccurate share counts.) This is the first time I've encountered this intentional redirect thing and I've asked a few times for more information about how it's set up just for my own edification, but all I can get is that it’s something managed at the server level and is designed to prevent separate share counts for HTTP and HTTPS. Has anyone encountered this method before, and can anyone either explain it to me or point me in the direction of a resource where I can learn more about how it's configured as well as the pros and cons? I'm especially concerned about our SEO with this and how this may impact the way search engines read our site. So far, nothing's come up on scans, but I'd like to stay one step ahead of this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ogiovetti0 -
Any crawl issues with TLS 1.3?
Not a techie here...maybe this is to be expected, but ever since one of my client sites has switched to TLS 1.3, I've had a couple of crawl issues and other hiccups. First, I noticed that I can't use HTTPSTATUS.io any more...it renders an error message for URLs on the site in question. I wrote to their support desk and they said they haven't updated to 1.3 yet. Bummer, because I loved httpstatus.io's functionality, esp. getting bulk reports. Also, my Moz campaign crawls were failing. We are setting up a robots.txt directive to allow rogerbot (and the other bot), and will see if that works. These fails are consistent with the date we switched to 1.3, and some testing confirmed it. Anyone else seeing these types of issues, and can suggest any workarounds, solves, hacks to make my life easier? (including an alternative to httpstatus.io...I have and use screaming frog...not as slick, I'm afraid!) Do you think there was a configuration error with the client's TLS 1.3 upgrade, or maybe they're using a problematic/older version of 1.3?? Thanks -
Technical SEO | | TimDickey0 -
Fundamental HTTP to HTTPS Redirect Question
Hi All I'm planning a http to https migration for a site with over 500 pages. The site content and structure will be staying the same, this is simply a https migration. Can I just confirm the answer to this fundamental question? From my reading, I do not need to create 301 redirect for each and every page, but can add a single generic redirect so that all http references are redirected to https. Can I just double check this would suffice to preserve existing google rankings? Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ruislip180 -
Historic issue with incomplete indexing
Hi there We run quite a big site in the UK in the commercial real-estate space. Historically we have always had a challenge getting our "primary" landing pages indexed, which are location based property result pages. e.g. https://realla.co/to-rent/commercial-property/oxford For example, for the "towns" category we have 8,549 submitted in our xml sitemap, with only 3,171 indexed. This is a general issue across all our sitemaps. 120k submitted, 80k indexed. Our pages are linked through breadcrumbs, and nearby links. In the new search console these pages are reported as "crawled - currently not indexed" These all sit under the folder: site:https://realla.co/to-rent/commercial-property/* site:https://realla.co/to-rent/office/* We have done extensive work to optimise performance, including AMP pages. Each location page has many details pages for individual properties e.g. https://realla.co/to-rent/details/0ffbbd0a1a1147edb8847c5ce6179509 One action we have remaining is to nest the details under the locations pages, which may help. These details pages are indexed fully. Any feedback much appreciated
Technical SEO | | ianparryuk0 -
Moving my website that is currently fully https (ssl) to http (non ssl).
Hey MOZ Community. I have a site that is currently full https (ssl) and what to move it to http (non-ssl). How will this move effect my SEO and what would be the best method of doing so without causing to much damage?
Technical SEO | | Bonx0 -
How I should fix a lot of 404 issues?
Hi guys, Recently I migrated a site from Drupal to Wordpress. I didn't contemplated the URL's will be different on Wordpress. Actually I have moren than 500 (the site has around 5000 pages) page not found issues on WMT and Moz. It because articles that has accents (spanish site) and symbols had wrong URLs in Drupal and right now in Wordpress that pages are not working.
Technical SEO | | alejandrogm
i.e: http://www.lapelotona.com/noticias/-tata-y-messi%2C-el-primer-saludo-de-los-rosarinos-/ So I want to know if I should fix the URLs and make the 301 redirect to each of them or only fix the issues and thats it. Thanks in advance if someone can help me.
Sorry if I have a mistake with my english, I still learning.0 -
A site I am working with has multiple duplicate content issues.
A reasonably large ecommerce site I am working with has multiple duplicate content issues. On 4 or 5 keyword domains related to site content the owners simply duplicated the home page with category links pushing visitors to the category pages of the main site. There was no canonical URL instruction, so have set preferred url via webmaster tools but now need to code this into the website itself. For a reasonably large ecommerce site, how would you approach that particular nest of troubles. That's even before we get to grips with the on page duplication and wrong keywords!
Technical SEO | | SkiBum0 -
See any issues with this tabbed content page?
When I view source, and view as Googlebot it's showing as 1 long page of content = good. However, the developer uses some redirects and dynamic page generation to pull this off. I didn't see any issues from a Search perspective but would appreciate a second opinion: Click here Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 540SEO0