Google To Give Secure HTTPS Sites A Ranking Boost

[Robert Charlton]

Just announced. Google's official blog post apparently hasn't gone live yet....

Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites
Aug 7, 2014 at 12:45am ET by Barry Schwartz
[searchengineland.com...]

Google has announced... that going HTTPS -- adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site -- will give you a minor ranking boost.

Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit, only counting as a "very lightweight signal" within the overall ranking algorithm.... Google says it has an impact on "fewer than 1% of global queries" but said they "may decide to strengthen" the signal because they want to "encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web."

Google has tested this and is reported to like what it sees. As I read the incomplete information currently available, using HTTPS is probably scored as a Panda-like quality signal. Not yet clear about why it should affect some queries and not others.

Two items that jumped out at me, among others, in Google's list of recommendations, that will likely need further discussion....

- Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
- Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains

I anticipate that this change is going to raise many questions in the community.

[jigneshgohel]

Does anyone know if you need to get the certificates from your current hosting company or can you buy ones from say <a discount registrar> and still use okay?

It is not necessary for one to buy/use particular SSL certificate. You can even use FREE ssl or you can purchase from resellers/certificate authority or what ever you find comfortable.
It is very important that you follow redirection,canonical and other important migration process carefully.

[darthtoon]

Has anyone else found themselves using the flexible SSL provided by Cloudflare?

I found out the other day that they automatically set this up on the domains I have hosted there, and as of today I noticed I now have both http and https versions of the same pages listed on Google, which I'm concerned is going to have a negative impact on my SEO?

[EditorialGuy]

Has anyone else found themselves using the flexible SSL provided by Cloudflare?

I've been using it on our smaller site for a while now.

I implemented it a few days after the Google HTTPS announcement, just to see what might happen. So far, so good.

[darthtoon]

Sounds promising - did you make any changes to your site or just let Cloudflare take care of it?

[EditorialGuy]

Darthon, I changed any absolute links to the https: version, both on the small site and on our larger site that links to it. (This wasn't a big deal, since most of the internal links were relative links.) Otherwise, Cloudflare did everything.

I've encountered only one minor annoyance: The site that now has https: is listed as the http: version in Google Webmaster Tools, so if I try to view a page with Google WMT's Fetch and Render, i get an error because Fetch and Render is looking for the http: version and gets confused by the redirect. (As far as I can tell, the rest of the Webmaster Tools are working fine.)

[aakk9999]

and as of today I noticed I now have both http and https versions of the same pages listed on Google, which I'm concerned is going to have a negative impact on my SEO?

If you have moved to https, you should implement 301 redirect from http to https version of the page.

If you use rel canonical, you should also make sure it points to https version of the page.

[phranque]

The site that now has https: is listed as the http: version in Google Webmaster Tools ...

those are separate sites.
you should add your new https: site to GWT and watch that separately from the legacy http: site.
make sure google is seeing and handling each hostname as you would expect and prefer.

[AussieWebmaster]

Google's John Mueller has stated https will not improve rankings as per [thesempost.com...]

also [webmasterworld.com...]

[chewy]

Just a comment to thank WebmasterWorld community for this thread (and all the great stuff over the years!)

site:webmasterworld.com ssl just helped me grok this issue in a way that is incomparable with anything else out there.

[System]

The following message was cut out to new thread by aakk9999 at 5:49 pm on Nov 24, 2014 (gmt 0). New thread at:

Move web to HTTPS: Let's Encrypt project, to be launched summer 2015
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4717981.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: aakk9999 at 5:57 pm (utc) on Nov 24, 2014]