Google Referrals HTTPS |
July 9th, 2015 |
| https, tech, traffic |
I've been reading in the news about Google moving more and more
traffic to HTTPS. I was looking at my server logs, though, and I
still see a lot of HTTP traffic:
Referenced in: More Mailbag
Testing now, if I fetch http://www.google.com with
curl I don't see a redirect to https but I do see
one in Chrome in incognito mode. I wonder what's keeping Google from
rolling out the redirect to other browsers?
(I do work for Google, but I don't have any inside information here.)
Update 2015-07-09: A major confounding factor here is that my site is on HTTP, I selected only traffic with referrers, and browsers do various things to hide referrers when going from HTTPS to HTTP. See discussion with Kleber in the comments.
Comment via: google plus, facebook
What User Agents are the sources of the HTTP traffic?
@Kleber Looking into this, I think there's bias from my site being http-only and browsers coming from https sometimes suppressing the referrer entirely. For example I see google traffic on Firefox as 99% http, but I think that's probably suppression.
That aside, here's what I see, looking at the fraction of accesses that are https where the referrer is google. (Restricting to UA groups with > 200 google referrals in the time period.):
97% (n=18219) Safari on iPhone
96% (n=31399) Chrome on Windows
96% (n=9517) Chrome on Mac
89% (n=5976) Safari on iPad
86% (n=1188) CrOS
70% (n=1734) Chrome on Linux
41% (n=18927) Chrome on Android
37% (n=4952) Safari on Mac
7% (n=488) MSIE 10
2% (n=2356) Android Browser
1% (n=2105) Trident/7
1% (n=6486) Firefox
0% (n=522) MSIE 9
0% (n=450) MSIE 8
0% (n=255) Opera Mini
Yes, it does look like the problem with my stats is browsers that hide referrals when going https -> http. Looking at traffic empty referrers I see 2.9x more FF traffic than Chrome/Windows traffic, while with non-empty referrers I see only 0.7x as much.
Here's the major non-bot UA groups for traffic with empty referrers:
304496 Firefox
105425 Chrome on Windows
102089 Safari on iPhone
87571 Safari on Mac
66057 Chrome on Mac
32617 Chrome on Android
27684 MSIE 6
22951 Chrome on Linux
17742 MSIE 8
14559 Safari on iPad
12610 Android Browser
12019 Trident/7
11842 MSIE 7
...
And for non-empty referrers:
397015 Chrome on Windows
315716 Chrome on Mac
277064 Firefox
206530 Safari on iPhone
182378 Chrome on Android
119266 Safari on Mac
85842 Chrome on Linux
81119 Safari on iPad
47388 Android Browser
44550 Trident/7
25911 MSIE 6
23257 Googlebot
16630 MSIE 9
13510 CrOS
13414 MSIE 8
10502 MSIE 10
...
All browsers strip the organic referrer upon clickthrough from HTTPS to HTTP. Google has used a variety of techniques to deliberately add back in a referrer header -- there's the <meta> referrer tag and there's a javascript-based HTTPS-to-HTTP downgrade redirector on http://google.com , and maybe some others, depending on the capabilities of the browser. I expect the downgrade redirect explains most of your HTTP http://google.com referrers.
Huh. Didn't know about the downgrade redirect. Does it provide search terms? I assume not.
I think it only indicates that the source was http://www.google.com , but I'm not positive.