Friday, September 26, 2014

Now Going HTTPS/SSL Will Boost your Ranking in Google

Google declared that Now-a-days they are using HTTPS/SSL as a ranking signal in search algorithm. When ranking signal is highly weak then webmasters should not show much interest about it, but now it is indeed a signal. Google announced that they are starting to use HTTPS/ SSL as a ranking signal. Google can add slight signals and also it had an impact on less than 1% of global queries. Google said HTTPS/ SSL having less weight when it is compared to panda signal.  Hence Google decided to strengthen this ranking signal over time to support all website holders to switch to HTTPS.

Here we have two questions, they are:
1.  If you have SSL already then what should you do?
2. Is there a negative side to going SSL?

1.  If you have SSL already then what should you do: This ranking boost is only useful to the HTTPS pages. Normally, HTTPS is only present in checkout pages but not in product and content pages etc. Hence you need to make your total domain name, URLs, and all the files to HTTPS. This will take time because you need to test and then test, to confirm the HTTPS certificate doesn't show any type of errors (image, video and other) to your clients.

2. Is there a negative side to going SSL: Google has told us many times that if you switch your site correctly, there is no problem at all. Google said that before there was an HTTPS boost there is no issue in a negative way for going HTTPS. In 2012, Matt Cutts supported users to go SSL with their sites. Google also enhanced Webmaster Tools to support HTTPS vs HTTP reporting.

Google gave some advices, they are:
  • 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.
Google also offers you use Qualys Lab tool to test your HTTPS pages and certificates.

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