Google Search

HTTPS availability affects website’s Google ranking

Google has been pushing for wider HTTPS adoption for a while now – converting its own services, working on the SPDY/HTTP 2.0 protocols, etc. Now, it seems, they want other people to start adopting HTTPS too. And what’s better way than add it as a signal to Google Search rankings?

[…] 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.

Nice! Especially for those selling SSL certificates…

Google drops profile photos

Just when I finally figured out how to have my profile photo show up in search results, Google is dropping the feature and changing the design. Thank you very much, Google. I hope at least this decision wasn’t based on my ugly mug appearing all around the web.

Searching CakePHP pages

CakePHP framework comes with the default PagesController which is an awesome out of the box way to build a website of mostly static pages. There is one rather annoying limitation though – no search option. If you need a website of mostly static pages with search functionality, you are out of luck. I spent a good chunk of time Googling (searching, eh?) for a solution and even talking to people in #cakephp IRC channel. The best alternatives, it turned out are listed in this StackOverflow answer:

There is no built in way to search static pages as they are just files on disk.

You have three options

Build a model to hold the data somewhat like a CMS so you can use mysql search.

google search for sites

the more hacky approach of reading the contents of all the pages and using preg_match() or similar on the contents to find matches.

The first option is probably the best depending on your use case. The second option is the easiest if its public facing content. The third option is a horrible idea

Since I need the solution for a public facing website, it looks like I’m gonna go with Google Custom Search Engine option.

Google authorship

For a while now I’ve been trying to have my avatar appear next to the search results leading to my blog. There are many guides online that I’ve tried, but nothing seems to work. I followed all the steps – verified my email, had a high quality image, linked the site to my Google+ profile, used the “by” string next to articles and the “?author” parameter in the link. Still, no image.

Today I was looking around to see if I could find any other tip. And apparently, there is this page now, which clarifies my problem in the first step:

Make sure you have a profile photo with a recognizable headshot.

When you put it this way, then I can see why even the high quality image wouldn’t be recognized. It’s not a full headshot. It’s a tight crop that computers might have a problem with, while people see. Hopefully, this will be enough to finally sort it out. If it will, I’ll play around with the original avatar to see how far I can take it without loosing the recognition.

Two more minor changes

I’ve done a couple of more changes to the site:

Links in posts content are now bold. This has been bugging me since the first day I started using this theme, but I never found time until now to actually fix it. Looking through the post, links are now easily identifiable – no need to move your mouse over every word you think has a different color shade.
Did some magic for Google to pick up the rich text snippet for the author. Hopefully, after the next time it indexes the site, there will be my little avatar right next to blog links in results. While I new the generic steps to do so, this post was helpful. Let’s see if it works now.