Somebody call security!!! HTTPS Ranking Signal

Recently, Google launched a new ranking signal – HTTPS! This boost is to encourage webmasters to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS.  Is it beneficial to you or does it matter?  What about websites that don’t sell anything or that don’t gather sensitive data?

Implications on organic ranking

While we’re on the subject of security, ironically this move comes from Google just weeks before celebrity iCloud accounts are hacked and their content spread across the internet and print media worldwide!  So maybe security for webmasters IS the way forward…more from the Webmasters Central Blog here.

Here are some tips if you are moving your website to HTTPS.

1. Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
2. Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible.
3. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
4. If you have some parts of your site migrated to HTTPS and some parts not, Google will give the boost to the ones on the HTTPS URLs and not to the others.
5. Be sure to resubmit your sitemap to Google for crawling and indexing.

In terms of Webmasters Tools, there’s more information on the change here. The HTTPS ranking signal is a standalone minor signal that is independent from any other ranking signal or algorithms (Panda etc).

You can do a test on your SSL server here.

For more information on SEO and ranking signals, get in touch with us at Matrix Internet.