Google Blog: HTTPS as a ranking signal

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal_6.html

For these reasons, over the past few months we've been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it's only a very lightweight signal—affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content—while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we'd like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

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In case anybody missed it.

I doubt this will have a huge impact on normal blog/information type website in the future. But I can see it being increasingly important ranking signal for the eCommerce side of things.

Looks like they've finally had a falling out with the NSA.

Oh look Google is biased toward something ! What a surprise. Joking aside, this is good news for the future.

True - seems really Google falling out with NSA.

I just knew that it would happen someday. I wonder if they'll get into the SSL cert business as well.. They just started with domain registrations.

I've been expecting such a ranking signal for quite a while as I continued coming across hacked sites during my research. It's only fair that secure sites should enjoy a bit more traffic than the other sites in the SERPs.

For now it's a lightweight signal, and a lightweight signal it will remain since it was publicly announced and SSL certificates aren't difficult to obtain.

Yea, but this is just going play a minor role in the algo. Google also struggles to rank smaller https sites at times because it can't seem to crawl them as well.

Requiring https is another publisher tax. Supporting https browsers and bots that don't support SNI requires a dedicated IP, a decent cert costs about $7 a year and it only makes sense Google will eventually prefer publishers with EVC's, which entails significant additional cost.

Making it too expensive to webspam is a pretty effective strategy for Google.

I am sure komodo and others saw a fantastic day today

It is exactly what happened some years ago with pageload.

They said that pageload was important and they have created a plugin for people to get a score for their websites.
They dismissed the score later on.

Pageload is a very very small signal in SEO. They said they will give more importance to pageload but they never did it. Google said the https ranking signal change affect less than 1% of queries so i guess it is a very small signal.

Backlinks will remain the real big signal.

I don't trust google and i am not going to buy dozens of ssl certificates for them. plus, many ssl certificates have an openssl version that is exposed to heartbleed like comodo

On top of that, there are good crawlers outside of googlebot that will not read https.
If you decide to switch to https, it means that you are going to get 301 redirections for your all site from http to https
some browsers don't read https (there are not only computers outside of here)

self signed ssl certificates on a website systematically result a warning message to each new visitors that says the certificate is not trusted. In other words, you have to buy certificates if you don't want to lose visitors after switching to https.

In other words, that can be very dangerous for your incoming traffic.

To me, It is a trap for dummies.

so true, if hit the major one of other nations to index website then google will follow.

For me its BS. May be its true. But i am ranking well than https sites.

thejake said:

Requiring https is another publisher tax. Supporting https browsers and bots that don't support SNI requires a dedicated IP, a decent cert costs about $7 a year and it only makes sense Google will eventually prefer publishers with EVC's, which entails significant additional cost.

Making it too expensive to webspam is a pretty effective strategy for Google.

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While it will surely weed out pretty much all small-time spammers, it will not deter the serious ones.