Now Googlebot will crawl with HTTP/2 protocol

Here is news for all the publishers associated with Readwhere CMS. Google crawls for your site will be over HTTP/2 protocol from now on. This will not affect your site’s rankings and doesn’t require any action from your end. However, you may see this change in your site’s logs.

This update is available for the sites that support HTTP/2 protocol. As Readwhere CMS supports HTTP/2 from 2019, the update is available for Readwhere CMS and it’s sites as well. The prime benefit of HTTP/2 includes improving crawling efficiency for Google as well as your site

According to Google:

“Generally, Googlebot crawls over HTTP/1.1. However, starting November 2020, Googlebot may crawl sites that may benefit from it over HTTP/2 if it’s supported by the site.”

What if your site doesn’t support HTTP/2 protocol?

Many of the site owners have this major and obvious doubt regarding the update. However, Google has answered all the queries regarding the same.

Google says, “If your server still only talks HTTP/1.1, that’s also fine. No explicit drawback for crawling over this protocol; crawling will remain the same, quality and quantity-wise.”

Understanding Googlebot/ Google's Web Crawler

The generic name of Google’s web crawler is Googlebot. The two types of crawlers that craws your site are a desktop crawler that stimulates a user on desktop and a mobile crawler that stimulates a user on a mobile device.

Googlebot runs simultaneously by thousands of machines to improve performance and scale as the web grows. There can be logs of several machines as many crawlers are crawling a maximum number of pages possible from your site. While the entire process, cutting down the bandwidth usage is taken care of.

Usually, Googlebot used to crawl over HTTP/1.1, but now will crawl sites that can benefit from it over HTTP/2 if it is supported by the site.

What is HTTP/2 protocol?

HTTP/2 is a revised version of HTTP network protocol which was derived from the earlier experimental SPDY protocol. This was developed by Google. HTTP/2 is developed by the HTTP Working Group of Internet Engineering Task Force which is used by World Wide Web. Chrome has supported SPDY since Chrome 6, but since most of the benefits are present in HTTP/2, it’s time for an update.

The shift to HTTP/2 will benefit the publishers in several ways as listed below:

Benefits of HTTP/2 protocol:

The topmost benefit by HTTP/2 is making the application simpler, faster and more robust.
Reducing latency by enabling full request and response multiplexing minimize protocol overhead via efficient compression of HTTP header fields.
HTTP/2 allows the interleaving of request and response messages on the same connection and uses an efficient coding for HTTP header fields.
Multiplexing, header compression, prioritization and protocol negotiation are some of the major benefits.

Note: HTTP/2 is extending and not replacing the previous HTTP standards. The core concepts, such as HTTP methods, status codes, URLs, and header fields, remain in place.

If you have any doubts or queries about the latest update, feel free to drop a comment and we will get back to you with a solution.