Website maintenance and optimizing have never been more tedious thanks to Google’s Panda, Hummingbird, and Pigeon updates. But just when you thought you’ve passed all of Google’s security tests along comes a new change recently announced in June at Google’s Annual I/O developer’s conference. The announcement explains why HTTPS sites may get better rankings in Google. Consequently, the announcement prompted site developers and SEO managers to seriously consider becoming HTTPS sites and dispose of the HTTP addresses.

HTTPS means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. When this appears on the URL, it means that the site can offer an additional layer of security through data encryption.

According to Larry Magid, the simplest way to describe HTTPS is that it encrypts the data between the browser and the site, which protects the security and privacy of anything you do on that site. He also mentioned that it’s not perfect, but it is a lot more secure than sites that don’t have that ‘s’.

Why transform to an HTTPS site?

According to Google’s Webmaster Central blog, they ran some tests and concluded that secure encryptions perform better in its search ranking algorithms.  With this, Google decided to implement the newest category for site ranking which is the HTTPS addresses. Now, a site would do better in the rankings if it has a secured encryption

However, this shouldn’t be a cause for panic for SEO managers and web developers since  this update only affects about 1 percent of global queries and does not impact SEO as much as high-quality content.

Currently, the weight placed on HTTPS sites in terms of SEO rankings is not substantial.  This means that you wouldn’t experience an immediate drop in ranking just because you are not an HTTPS site. There will be no dramatic decline in the rankings.

If your website collects private information from your users, such as financial information or social media account details, or contains an e-commerce component you should already be using HTTPS.

However, those sites which require users to log in or password-protects any type of data should consider implementing HTTPS.  On another note, the HTTPS does not actually protect from hacker attacks or data leaks but rather improves the security of the browsing session to prevent visitors from being spied on.

If your site offers content in the form of blogs, videos, news, etc. that users do not need to create an account to access, then you can continue using the HTTP platform. For now, focusing on other SEO related best practices like great content, content marketing, earning links and social media mentions are a better use of your time than converting to HTTPS.

When converting to HTTPS, determine what kind of certificate you need, whether single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate. You also have to use 2048-bit key certificates, relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain, and protocol relative URLs for all other domains.

We don’t see the need to convert this site to HTTPS. But, we have already made some recommendations for some of our clients to consider making the move.