Google announced that, they are now using SSL/HTTPs as a ranking signal in their Google search algorithm. In fact, Google said this carries “less weight than other signals such as high-quality content.”
Based on their tests, Google says it has an impact on “less than 1% of global queries” but said they “may decide to strengthen” the signal because they want to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTP’s to keep everyone safe on the web. Also the HTTPs signal showed “positive results” in terms of relevancy and ranking in Google’s search result.
Even back in 2012, Matt Cutts encouraged users to go SSL with their sites. Google even improved Google Webmaster Tools to support HTTPS vs HTTP reporting.
Here are some basic tips to get started:
- Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
- Use 2048-bit key certificates
- Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
- Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
- Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
- Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
If your website is already serving on HTTPS, you can test its security level and configuration.
