Google has announced that going to HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site — will give you a minor ranking boost.
What are HTTPS and SSL?
HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) is simply a secure version of http. Historically, HTTPS connections were primarily used for online payment transactions, e-mail and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems. In recent years, the use of HTTPS has become more widespread: for protecting page authenticity on all types of websites, securing accounts and keeping user communications, identity and web browsing private.
Why switch to HTTPS?
Having a secure site – one with an https prefix in the URL – is considered by Google as a positive. So much so that it is now rewarding https sites by giving them a positive ranking signal.
At the moment, this is only a very lightweight signal, affecting less than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content. Google says this is to give webmasters time to switch their clients’ sites to HTTPS.
Over time, however, this may strengthen, as Google pushes for all website owners to make the switch from HTTP to HTTPS. Their reasoning is primarily about safety, and meeting the growing call for more security from searchers.
Because HTTPS applies to individual URLS (a single page) you can choose which pages on your site you want to convert to HTTPS.
What are the risks?
If you want to make the switch, you need to take the proper steps to ensure your traffic doesn’t suffer. That means make sure to communicate to Google that you moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS.
Google has posted 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.
- Remember to track your HTTP to HTTPS migration carefully in your analytics software and within Google Webmaster Tools.