Google gives preference to HTTPS/SSL secure sites

After a long time Google brings smiles on SEOs face with its new announcement aired on Google Webmaster Central. The report explains that Google will from now start using website encryption and will give a minor ranking boost to website i.e. HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate.

However, on the other side, the giant search engine has also cleared that Https/SSL sites will get a meager ranking benefit that would count “very lightweight signal” on the whole ranking algorithm. Actually, Google also unveiled that it will carry “Less weight than the other signals such as high-quality content.”

As per the tests carried out by Google, it has an impact on “fewer than 1% of global queries” but later, they also added that this “may decide to strengthen” the signal as they want to foster webmasters to switch from HTTP to HTTPS for the safety on the web.

Based on their tests conducted in last few months, Google also said, the HTTPs signal have showed the positive results, especially when it comes to rank in Google’s search results and relevancy. Who says Google gives shocks?

There is nothing to shock if Google is giving a ranking boost to secure HTTPS/SSL because Google had already intimated about this move five months back by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s search spam at SMX West. He had said that he would love to make SSL a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

In less than five months, Google made it a reality and now it’s officially cleared that https and SSL would get more benefits by the search engine.

On its official blog, google also shared some valuable tips to start going https. These techniques include

• 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

In order to have better https friendly sites, Google has updated the Google Webmaster Tools. Get it now.

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