Google HTTPS / SSL Rank boost?

Earlier in the year, Matt Cutts stated that an SSL ?could? factor in Google?s ranking algorithm. Now, with the head of search spam on extended leave, is this actually happening and why now?

Google has announced that going HTTPS - adding an SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site - will give you a minor ranking boost. Google Webmasters Tools have also been updated to better handle HTTPS sites.

As of yet, the ranking benefit is only a small signal within the overall ranking algorithm. The change will purportedly only affect fewer than one percent of global queries - although still a considerable number.

Factors such as high-quality content still carry more weight, although Google says they may decide to strengthen the signal. They expect this to ?encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS, to keep everyone safe on the web.?

This is an announcement that has been met with some negativity among webmasters, many of whom believe this is an attempt by Google to shape the online climate, pushing sites to be made how they want, rather than how the owners or users want.

Others are skeptical of the end-results. While HTTPS may make forms safer to complete, there are other methods of hacking users? information. SSL is far from commonplace, and many site owners are still ignorant of it or how to make the change.

Meanwhile, based on tests over recent months, the HTTPS signal showed positive results in terms of relevancy and ranking in Google?s search results.

SEO Concerns

Will your SEO suffer? Possibly. The important thing is to make sure that Google knows you moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS so that you don?t lose traffic. If you follow the proper steps, there shouldn?t be a problem; Google has been proclaiming it?s safe for years!

More documentation will be available in the future - or so Google tells us. For now, G has the following tips:

• 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.

Make sure the move is successful by adhering to the guidelines set out by Google, here.

BHW what?s your view on this? Do you have secure sites that caught a ranking boost?

How can you use this pearl of wisdom from G to help rank your sites? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Google is a for-profit corporation, so there must be some economical sense to this. Since when does Google give two shits about privacy on the WWW?

I think this is one more example of Google deciding what gets seen and what doesn't. Of course they have the right to do that, based on free speech, the problem is people should wake the fuck up and start using other search engines or pretty soon the WWW will be Google's private Facebook.

bartosimpsonio said:

people should wake the fuck up and start using other search engines or pretty soon the WWW will be Google's private Facebook.

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Yet other search engines do not provide the search quality people might be looking for. I hate to see ugly (in terms of content and look) to rank high on Bing, which is one of the reasons I'm not using for. And since I've had that experience, I would not go back to them even if they improved in the future.

I know SEO said:

Now, with the head of search spam on extended leave

Click to expand...

And you're also on vacation right now apparently... What a coincidence...

Treeofl1 said:

And you're also on vacation right now apparently... What a coincidence...

Click to expand...

LOL. Good one.

Do you have anything to say about this, Matt? Uhm, I mean I Know SEO?

It eludes me what a secure certificate has to do with site content relevancy to search phrase. google was a search engine back then, now they think they are a guide book on how to build a site or run Internet businesses?
Buying SSL my ass.

They are soon launching their own domain registrar (/domains) They might be offering SSL certs for good money.

I haven't seen much change in the past 3 weeks on a tough nationwide niche, #1 is non-ssl too on main area.. You can get free 2048-bit SSL certificates from startssl.com if anyone is interested.

Google is going to keep on trying to push webmasters to conform to a google-centric view of the www to further their own goals of controlling content. I run a legitimate SaaS that has only catered to SEO as an after thought for the past 5 years. We have always been in the top 3 (usually #1) for all key terms in all search engines ---until recently. This year, 2014, we lost our top 10 rankings in G and now show in the second page for our primary key term. Now spammy, small-time no-profit companies litter the top 10 for our key terms and the big G now tells us that we should change over to SSL for our entire site?! Why should we listen to them at all?

I, for one, refuse to use SSL for anything other than our order pages and user profile area. If that's not credible enough, then too bad. I won't change that for Google but I am 100% for any black hat methods to get back our top rankings. Enough of doing it the right way. Google long ago lost our respect and now we have no reason not to do whatever it takes to recover our rankings now that they can't do anything worse. Being banned wouldn't affect traffic any more than being on the second page anyway.

I'm new here, btw, so hello!

Thank you for good structured post

I think this is just another way for Google to distinguish between sites they want to rank (i.e. with some money for SSL certs) and those without, so Google can then more accurately target those companies in the future - Google's way of targeted list building

bartosimpsonio said:

Google is a for-profit corporation, so there must be some economical sense to this. Since when does Google give two shits about privacy on the WWW?

I think this is one more example of Google deciding what gets seen and what doesn't. Of course they have the right to do that, based on free speech, the problem is people should wake the fuck up and start using other search engines or pretty soon the WWW will be Google's private Facebook.

Click to expand...

I could be completely wrong here and feel free to poke holes in this theory.

The NSA has been hassling large tech companies to collect data and hand it over to them. Yahoo has fought this tooth and nail because if they don't and people find out, which they will, the company's share prices will drop. In a TED talk, Edward Snowden talked about large companies encrypting all traffic that goes too and from a website. He gave the example of someone buying a book of Amazon, where there is no sensitive data but the user would prefer their browsing data to be kept private.

I think this is Google using their power to try and fight the bully.

Having said that, the NSA has been known to give bad advice that potentially puts hole that they can exploit in various protocols, such as HTTPS. Sorry for hyjacking the thread, but I think this is a for-profit move.

Sorry to bump up this thread, but this was great information for me and I hope it will help others as well.

I discussed with a friend that HTTPS will become the norm soon. If you check out a lot of the big SEO websites, some have already switched over. Lots of companies have changed all the pages to the HTTPS protocol. Majestic is a great example of this. I will likely start following this industry thread as well for my own network.

I think the SSL certificate boost will matter more and more over time. It makes setting up spammy domains more costly and thus deterring spammers and hurting their profitability. Also it will help legitimate site operators prove they control a site through the various SSL Validation processes. I think Google will give the highest boost to EV SSL certificates as they require the most effort to get.

To be honest I haven't seen any movement once I switched over to HTTPS. However, it seems like a lot of sites don't accept HTTPS because they say it costs more on server costs for some reason. Guess this is more of a long term SEO boost.

Do I need to go https even if my visitors only browse the pages and not register or buy anything? Also, when will BHW go https?