Encrypted Websites Will Now Get A Boost In Google Search Rankings

Google wants to make the Internet a safer place and has worked hard to improve their own security over the years. Today Google announced they’re taking their dedication to security a step further by making HTTPS a ranking signal.

Google has been running tests over the past few months using encrypted connections as a ranking signal. After seeing positive results, Google will be using HTTPS as a ranking signal going forward.
Google says that, for now anyway, this is a “very lightweight” signal that will affect fewer than 1% of global queries. While Google gives time for webmasters to move over to HTTPS, HTTPS as a ranking signal will carry less weight than other signals such as high-quality content.

Eventually, Google may decide to make HTTPS a stronger ranking signal as a way to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS “to keep everyone safe on the web.”
In order to make TLS adoption easier, Google will be publishing a best practices guide in the next dew weeks. For now, here are some best practices:

• 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
• 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.