Goolge has annouced that they started to use HTTPS (SSL) as a ranking signal. At first, it is a lightweight signal rather than other signals like high-quality content since Google wants to give webmasters time to change to use HTTPS (buying & installing SSL Certificate). Now, Google may strengthen HTTPS ranking signal in order to keep everyone safe on the web.
If you do not have an SSL Certificate, buying and installing it to your web server is your first priority. Here are some basic tips for getting started from Google.
- 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 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