Is "https" neccessary for Seo-Ranking?

It is clearly a SEO factor nowadays. There are some factors you can play with others you can't. (ie domain age) so what would you look the other way when you can do it and nowadays it is free with most hosting providers.

Google's long term plan is to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure, starting in January they will do warning on all sites collecting passwords or cc info.

Tozzy said:

Lol @ people expect it. You appear like some one who haven't any interaction with real people for a long time. I bet 95% of normal users barely know what HTTPS is and few of them actually give a damn about it. Well maybe when it comes down to payment processing and stuff like that, still not many would care.

In my opinion, nowadays many websites use HTTPS and some people preach that everyone should use it and that it is expected however I find it to be very wrong.

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I own a marketing business that turns over well over £300k per annum, without any direct marketing at all. We've outgrown two offices and have one on a High Street in a major town in the UK.

You have your opinion, that's cool. However, I deal with well over £xxx.xxxx worth of online marketing for my clients each and every month - I choose my clients, don't beg them so this might surprise you, but I have the data to back it up, ten fold.

You're right, a fair amount of people don't know what a HTTPS is or the meaning behind it but their browsers, firewalls and virus checkers do and people trust those. It's no secret that people are getting more and more tech-savvy.. so for the sake of £40 a year for a secure socket, you might as well... even is it only brings in 5% more traffic a month. There is also a ton or PR about being secure and its not going to stop. We, as site owners educate customers which in turn, makes people expect things, like a secure site.

I've actually run a test with another couple of agencies. None in the top 20 of Google had HTTPs. We tested by ranking one https website at the bottom of page one and guess what, it actually got more (although small) traffic that the other 9 sites above it (that we also owned). We've tested this a couple of times. It's actually part of a sales pitch that a developer uses now.. It simply works and the ROI from a HTTPS is actually pretty decent, not amazing just decent.

So before you jump all over that keyboard giving the big bollocks... some people being this black and gold site actually are in this game while you're giving stuff away for free, we're actually actually cashing from it, or a reason, it works.

Apart from safeguarding your website from malicious malware, HTTPS is currently a SEO factor. It's considered as one of the core ranking factors by Google.

bartosimpsonio said:

If everything else is equal, and you're using https and your competitor is not, you'll be above them.

But in the mix of ranking signals, https is a very weak one. Google never acknowledges a strong signal, ever. If they said https ranks you, it means they want you to use https, but it probably means less than 1% in the whole formula.

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Is this the same problem with seo ranking when you buy a new domain or move web to https ?

SSL is not really needed, unless you are handling customer data.