posted in search engine optimization on 7 August 2014
by Andrew Lang
View by Categories | View By Latest

Google's Tail Continues to Wag the Dog

Google have been acting as a de facto (and unelected) "government of webmasters" for a few years now, and their latest "law" shows just how much control they have over all webmasters who see Google as vital to their business (important point!).

HTTPS is now a ranking signal

Google have stated that indeed, HTTPS (SSL) is now seen as a ranking signal - in plain English (as plain as I can make it), it means that if you encrypt the data sent from (and between) your website's pages, Google will favour that site and give it a slight boost in the rankings.

Switching from HTTP to HTTPS is a non-trivial change a site has to go through, with downsides too:-

the site's server resources will receive a heavier workload
an SSL certificate can be bought cheaply (around £10 per year), but installing them will require someone to do it for you, and that might mean another £20 to £100 a year costs for your website depending on what such a person would charge. You'd also need to trust them as they'd have root access to the server hosting your site
you'd need to 301 redirect all your pages from HTTP to HTTPS
You'd lose all of your social network "counts" as Facebook, Twitter et al don't count 301 redirects
Page speeds will be slower due to encryption

The initial reaction from forums and social networks (see here) has understandably been negative.

Share this article:

view my profile on Google+