Do secure sites using HTTPS help ranking results?
A recent article on Google Webmaster Central Blog caused quite a buzz in the SEO community.
The full article can be read here – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
However, the essence of the article is summed up as follows:
Google has been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. They’ve seen positive results, so they’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal.
What does this mean and how should you respond?
First…it means there will be lots of SEO charlatans coming out with plugins and other pseudo helpful products that claim to address this 100% for you.
Don’t fall for it!!!
Just because a secure site with SSL encryption can give a better ranking in some circumstance doesn’t mean it will do so 100% of the time. Any SEO expert worth his salt will sit down and look at your SPECIFIC site to determine if switching to a secure connection will be worth it.
Secondly, this isn’t something you need to put on your “high priority” list right now. Google (and specifically Matt Cutts) talked about this over 2 years ago in a Hacker News article – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801641
There are numerous issues for webmasters switching to https besides just the added cost. It potentially requires 301 redirects and doing things wrong could temporarily (or permanently) demote your rankings.
Thus, we don’t anticipate the extra “juice” from a secure site ever being universal or significant except in certain niches. It would cause far too many issues and added costs for the minor benefit achieved. Plus, Google realizes that if it carried too much weight, it would be something easily manipulated to give sites with less quality content higher rankings.
Nevertheless, here is a video by the man at Google himself talking about some concerns related to switching to https secure websites.
