mod deflate and SEs

[Tonearm]

I just started using the mod_deflate apache module to serve my pages in a compressed form for decompression by the client. Has anyone heard of SE spiders having trouble handling that? The served pages shouldn't be compressed unless the client passes certain headers to indicate they can handle it, but I wanted to check with you guys anyway.

[lammert]

Serving compressed pages to the search engines can be an advantage because it reduces bandwidth. I switched to mod_deflate about a year ago and have not seen any problems with the search engines.

As far as I remember Googlebot requests compressed content, I am not sure about the other search engines.

[Tonearm]

Thanks lammert. I guess mod_deflate is built into apache2 now?

[coopster]

It is, but it is an extension [httpd.apache.org] module.

[Tonearm]

Thanks coopster. Apparently it is installed by default in Gentoo.

[Tonearm]

By the way, please let me know if you did anything other than this in httpd.conf to get it going:

AddOutputFilter DEFLATE html css

[lammert]

My httpd.conf contains

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
DeflateCompressionLevel 1

There are several compression levels between 1 and 9. The resulting page size difference between levels 1 and 9 is not very large, but for my celeron server there is a noticable difference in compression time between the two. Therefore I have use the lowest compression level.