Every Ecommerce outlet knows the importance of SEO, especially on Google’s search engine, so knowing the advances and changes to Google’s ranking is key to having good search engine placement.
The latest update to Google’s search algorithm takes into consideration what the firm has been an advocate recently, security. According to a recent blog post on Google’s Webmaster Blog, search rankings will now take into consideration security measures, primarily HTTPS encryption.
The drive behind the new criteria is something Google calls HTTPS everywhere, an initiative to boost online security, especially for users experiencing the web through Google’s services.
The new signal is not as important as past signals Google boasts for ranking, such as content, but may have a higher level of significance in the future.
“For these reasons, 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. For now it's only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content,” stated Google’s blog post.
In addition to stating the new signal, Google also presented tips for webmasters and developers to get their site in order on the security aspect.
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 noindex robots meta tag
What do you think about security as signal for Google searches? Is Google asking too much, or does it seem like the right move? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
