Google boosts sites with HTTPS in SERPs

Google will begin to use HTTPS as a factor in the position of the site in its search results - this step should encourage web developers who were in no hurry with increased security measures or who doubted how important this was for their site, TechCrunch writes .

HTTPS support will not have the same weight as content quality, for the first time, the new criterion will affect no more than 1% of all global requests - this way Google gives webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. However, over time, the effect of encryption on search results will increase as the company pays more and more importance to site security.

Google also promises to publish a series of articles on the effective implementation of TLS (HTTPS also known asHTTP over TLS or Transport Layer Security ), so site developers can better understand what they need to do in order to implement the technology, and what errors can be avoided. These tips will include questions such as what type of certificate is needed, how to use relative URLs for resources on the same secure domain, best practices for indexing sites, and more.

In addition, Google advises web developers to test their sites with HTTPS using the Qualys Lab tool . In case of questions, the company suggests contacting its Help Forum for webmasters , where its employees are already participating in active discussions with the community.

Announcement has attracted a lot of feedback from developers and participants of sites SEO-industry - for example, a post on Google blog received more than 1,000 comments. For the most part, the community seems to support the innovation, or at least acknowledge that they expected something like this and are not surprised.

In recent months, Google itself has taken steps to better protect its own traffic, including by enabling encryption of traffic between its servers. Gmail also now always uses an encrypted HTTPS connection, which protects messages from being intercepted on the way between the user's computer and Google servers. HTTPS and site encryption have been around for many years, but apparently the latest state-of-the-art tracking of users is finally pushing the community to pay more attention to their security.