Google has announced in the blog post HTTPS as Ranking Signal that the website with HTTPS can get a better rank compared to HTTP website. Most of the websites in the internet are not using HTTPS. I did an analysis of many e-commerce websites in India which are implementing the HTTPS only for the Order Page, Customer Registration and Login pages etc and rest of the pages are just HTTP. So We can expect some changes in the SERP in next days or weeks in the e-commerce and other related segments as many sites will start implementing the secure SSL certificates. It will be interesting to see how the rank can be improved for the static websites ?
Importance of HTTPS Signal
- As of now its a light weight seo signal – Which means this signal will not be showing major changes in SERP
- It effects 1% of the global queries – Which is approx 1% of 3.5 billion
- As time progress HTTPS will be considered as a very important signal, As Google wants to give time to webmasters to upgrade to secure connection.
Cost of SSL Certificate ?
SSL Certificate in GoDaddy is starting in India for Rs 4,399 per year for standard package.
What Webmaster’s needs to do ?
- Buy an SSL certificate from certificate provider. (Godaddy, Bigrock etc are offering these certificates)
- Install the SSL Certificate on the Web Server
- Define all pages of site to use https:// instead of http://
- Redirect all the http:// url’s to https:// using the 301 redirects. (Move Site Guide)
- Add the site with HTTPS:// to Google Webmaster Tools and Verify
- Monitor the transition and results in GWT Queries Tool and Google Analytics
Lets see how this signal is going to effect the search rankings over a period of time.