Google's promises

[fomayof928@mowline]

All of these benefits suggest pushing HTTP/2 support as soon as possible. However, my experience with technical SEO has taught me to double-check and experiment with solutions that can impact our SEO efforts.

So the question is: Does Googlebot support HTTP/2?


HTTP/2 represents a promised land, the technical SEO ecuador number data that everyone has been looking for. By now, many websites have already added HTTP/2 support, and developers no longer want to optimize for HTTP/1.1. Before I could answer Robert's question, I needed to know whether Googlebot only supports HTTP/2-crawling.

I wasn’t alone in my question. It’s a topic that comes up often on Twitter, Google Hangouts, and other such forums. And like Robert, I had clients pressuring me for answers. It was necessary to experiment. Below I’ll explain how we arrived at our answer, but here’s a spoiler: it doesn’t happen. Google doesn’t crawl using the HTTP/2 protocol. If your website uses HTTP/2, you need to make sure you continue to optimize the HTTP/1.1 version for crawling purposes.

Question
It all started with Google Hangouts in November 2015.



When asked about HTTP/2 support, John Muller stated that HTTP/2-only crawling should be ready by early 2016, and he also stated that HTTP/2 will make it easier for Googlebot to crawl pages by bundling requests (images, JS, and CSS can be downloaded with a single bundled request).