HTTPS as Google’s next ranking signal

Google considers security as high priority.  We heavily invest in ensuring that services use the top-level security, such as strong HTTPS encryption by default. When people use Gmail and Google Drive, they will have a secure connection to Google automatically.

 
Aside from their own ‘stuff,’ Google are also making effort to make the internet a safer place. A big focus of this is making sure the websites accessed from Google are safe and secure. For example, they have created resources to assist webmasters to restrict and fix any security agreements on their sites.
 
Google wants to take this one step further. Recently, they called up for HTTPS everywhere on the web.
 
Google also states they have seen increasing numbers of webmasters embracing and adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is great news for Google.
 
Due to those factors, over recent months, Google have been running tests with consideration if sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal into Google’s search ranking algorithms. The results were positive, which lead Google to start using HTTPS as a ranking signal. At present, the signal is very light and only affects less than 1% of the global queries, giving webmasters the time to switch to HTTPS. However, over the next few months, Google are considering of making this stronger to encourage webmasters to switch from HTTP to HTTPS for optimum safety on the web.
 
Google has announced that in coming weeks, they will publish best practices, which make the TLS adoption process easier, and to help reduce mistakes. Whilst announcing this, Google has provided some basic tips:
 

• Decide the appropriate certificate for your site: 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
• Donwitht block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt