Do SSL Certificate Affect Search Rankings?

Google recently announced that making the switch from HTTP to https will give you a minor ranking boost. Since this announcement, marketers around the world have gone crazy about it. They are asking, is SSL good for SEO? Which type of SSL certificate will do the trick with the search engine and boost my rankings?

I’ve been reading a lot of questions about this on Reddit. I can feel a lot of confusion around webmasters and website owners about this topic. That’s why I decided to talk a little about it.

What is HTTPS?

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. The ‘S’ at the end of HTTPS stands for ‘Secure’. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted. So this means that having an SSL certificate installed on their website will add trust and security.

What’s The SEP Benefit of Switching to HTTPS?

So far we are clear that HTTPS offers security to the users, so it is definitely the choice to put you in Google’s good graces. There are also some additional SEO benefits for you to consider.

Increased Rankings

Like most ranking signals, it is very hard to isolate on its own, but this is still something to keep in mind. On the plus side, the value of switching to HTTPS is very likely to increase over time.

Privacy

HTTPS adds security for your SEO goals and website in several ways:

• It verifies that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to.
• It prevents tampering by third parties.

I want to Buy a SSL? Things To Consider When Buying an SSL

Google has provided the following tips for best practices when switching to HTTPS:

• Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain or wildcard certificate
• Use 2048-bit key certificates
• Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
• Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
• Check out our site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
• Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
• Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the no index robots meta tag.
• Google has also updated Google Webmaster Tools to better handle HTTPS sites and the reporting on them.
• Track your HTTP to HTTPS migration carefully in your analytics software and within Google Webmaster Tools.

Are you Ready for SSL?

Ready or not website owners are making the decision to install SSL certificates. About 90% of my clients have already purchased their SSL certificate and knowing that these changes will help them stay in good graces with Google. As a Final recommendation, I would say to switch as soon as you can to SSL, just to keep up with Google.

Have you recently switched over to HTTPS and seen any results? What are the major challenges you faced during the installation? share your thoughts in the comment box below.