Along with recent security concerns, the reasons to get your site protected with an SSL certificate are growing as Google announced yesterday that HTTPS is now a ranking signal used in its search algorithm. Google has been pushing the use of HTTPS (HTTP over TLS/Transport Layer Security) for quite some time, and called for “HTTPS everywhere” at a recent Google I/O.
The company says it’s seeing more and more webmasters adopting it, and that over the past few months it’s been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure encrypted connections as a signal. You can read the full blog post on the Google Webmaster Blog here.
“We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.”
If you’re already serving on HTTPS, you can test its security level and configuration using this Qualys Lab tool. If you have not secured your site with HTTPS then you can purchase an SSL certificate below cost price from Thexyz which also includes free installation!
