Security is a top priority for Google. A big part of meeting this priority is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. In the past, HTTPS is a necessity for all online transactions (banks, e-commerce sites), the rest of the website is usually on HTTP. To enhance its effort in protect the users from cyber attacks, Google has announced that it will start prioritizing secure HTTPS URLs over regular HTTP ones.
Keep everyone safe on the web.
Google based ranking on high-quality content. If your pages contain useful content that will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site, you would have higher page ranking. But Google “may decide to strengthen” the security movement as they want to “encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.”
Moving from HTTP to HTTPS
But take note, you need to complete a few more steps to ensure your traffic doesn’t suffer. After moving your site from HTTP to HTTPS, Google would consider this as a site move and you need to make sure to communicate this move Google.
Google has since release more documentation on best practices, here are some of the following tips:
- Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
- Migrate to 2048-bit key certificates
- Ensure relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
- Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
- Check out our site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
- 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.
Want a ranking boost? Start by shifting your website to HTTPS if you haven’t. Let’s all make the web more secure!
