This past week, Google announced that it would be adjusting its indexing system to find more HTTPS pages versus HTTP pages. Google’s blog states that over the course of the past year, they had been giving a slight search engine ranking advantage to HTTPS URLs in hopes of promoting a more secure internet browsing experience for millions of users.
If you didn’t know, HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. This is a protocol over which the data between your browser and the webpage you’re viewing is transferred to and from. HTTPS is the secure version of this protocol. This means that the data that is being sent and received is encrypted, therefore protecting your confidential information such as online banking information, etc.
What do these changes in Google mean for your site? This means that going forward, Google will try and show pages on search results that use the HTTPS protocol versus the HTTP protocol. If your site’s internal navigation has pages that use HTTP, Google will attempt to run them through HTTPS. If those pages work on HTTPS, Google will index them and favor them on its search engine results page. However, there are conditions to what Google will constitute as a “secure page” that can be found on their blog.
These recent changes are a part of Google’s fervent effort to make users’ browsing experiences more secure and promoting a safe overall web experience. Making these changes to your website can help improve your search engine rankings on Google.
Need a website built that incorporates this new security feature and helps improve your SEO? Contact us today for more information.
