Its official – search giant Google declared last week that it will be ranking websites with SSL certificates higher in the search results.
The effect of SSL certificates on SEO ranking has been speculated since long. Digital security specialists have always emphasized that securing the data transfer on your website with an SSL certificate is a must; not only for getting customer trust, but also to ensure proper visibility of your business and website in search engines.
Over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.
– Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google.
With Google clearing the air and making it public that websites without SSL certificates will be ranked lower, getting an SSL certificate now is a must for online presence.
Google takes into consideration a number of signals to position a website in the search engine results, such as high quality unique content, backlinks, relevance to a search request etc., and will now include SSL certificate as a key factor too.
To give website owners enough time to adopt SSL certificates, Google will give relatively less weight to SSL certificates, but has made it clear that it will “strengthen it over time to keep everyone safe on the web.”
Many reputed companies like LinkedIn and Yahoo have recognized this trend and have moved towards the secure HTTPS zone.
Overtime, when Google makes this factor fully functional in its search engine algorithms, smaller websites who do not utilize SSL certificates for encrypting their data transmission, stand to lose a lot as lower ranking on Google search engine translates to lesser traffic, lower reputation and subsequent loss in business.
GoSSDHosting encourages all its customers to secure their website and business online with the right SSL certificate.
Note: As of now their is no demand by google for what kind of SSL Certificate you use.
Google has published the following best practices to purchase the right SSL certificate-
- Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard SSL certificate.
- Use 2048-bit key SSL certificates.
- Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
- Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
- Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
It is must that you install the SSL certificate correctly and follow the above steps correctly. If anything goes wrong, then you will see opposite result. So make sure, you are sure what your doing and get it done correctly and safely. You will also observe down fall in ranking after installing SSL certificate and moving from HTTP to HTTPS and can last for 2-3 days, weeks, or even months. After Google is satisfied with your installation, it will automatically increase your ranking.
