HTTPS As A Ranking Signal

Earlier this month Google Announced that making your website secure (SSL/HTTPS) could have a positive effect on your websites search engine rankings.  This is hardly going to put you at the top for all of your targeted keywords but it looks like Google will want this to be a standard procedure in the near future and websites that aren’t secure will be affected.

For now Google has said that it is only going to be a very small signal in the overall algorithm “affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signal such as high quality content”.  There is no harm in jumping on the bandwagon early to get ahead of your competitors. Eventually all websites will need to be secure and having HTTPS as a ranking signal is a good way of Google encouraging safety online.

Did you know?

The ironic thing is that by just making your website secure you could actually affect your search engine rankings. A few important steps to take when switching your website from HTTP to HTTPS your site could be affected once it has been made secure:

301’s – Most likely all of your links from external websites will be pointing to the http version of the URL. You will need to set up 301 redirects on all of these to redirect to the new https URL or the link juice isn’t going to carry over.

Internal links – Similar to point 1, all of your websites internal links will be pointing to the http URL’s. This can be quickly done on some websites by downloading all of your websites pages and doing a find and replace.

Canonicals – Make sure you setup the canonical tags with your https URL’s

Duplicate content – You may have an http and https version of your website. Make sure you have your .htaccess file set up correctly so that Google is to only crawl the https version of your website.

I will be making a note of our current Google UK rankings (https://wsidmg.com.au.au/) then making the website secure to test the effect.  I will do a quick blog post with the results.

We advise that all of our existing clients and anyone reading this post purchase an SSL certificate and have it installed on their website. If you would like WSI to make your website secure, please contact us on 01302 867949 or office@wsipowerontheweb.com.