It was a few months ago, when Matt Cutts, senior engineer at Google said that he loved to make HTTPS or SSL a ranking factor in Google’s ranking algorithms. But now, it seems Google has taken it seriously as it recently announced on its official Webmaster blog that those websites, upgrading from HTTP to HTTPS or adding a SSL 2048-bit certificate on their site will get a minor ranking boost. According to Google’s official blog, there has been rising trend of webmasters adopting HTTPS or SSL on their website and due to this reason, the internet search giant has been running tests for the past few months taking into account whether websites use secure and encrypted connections as a signal to Google’s search ranking algorithms.

According to Google, results obtained from these tests are very much positive and therefore Google started considering the use of HTTPS as a ranking factor. As of now, Google only provides a small ranking benefit to those sites which use HTTPS or SSL certificate and less than one percent of global search queries has been impacted by this testing. As a part of strengthening this strategy, Google through its official blog is encouraging all site owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone secure on the web. In addition, the Webmaster blog is offering basic tips to avoid mistakes that occur during the HTTPS switching process.

  • Site owners are provided with the option of the kind of certificate they need – single, multi-domain or wildcard certificate
  • Google recommends the use of 2048-bit key certificates
  • Site owners can utilize relative URLs for resources that exist in the same secured domain
  • Google suggests that site owners must not block their HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
  • Site owners can use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
  • When switched to HTTPS, avoid the use of noindex robots meta tag and allow indexing of web pages by Google and other search engines where possible.
  • Use Google’s site move for more information on how changes your site address

Many people SEO industry is now raising questions about this HTTPS switching there have been mixed response to this news. They are now waiting for what Google is going to do in coming days, whether Google moves forward with their “small ranking benefit” strategy or will they introduces a new algorithm update for checking which all websites not have switched to HTTPS.