Google Giving Weight to HTTPS in Search Results

Maybe not everything, but certainly more than we are doing now.

So how do you encourage more sites to use HTTPS? Well, if you are Google, you tweak the SEO black box:

we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

From HTTPS as a ranking signal on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

The call to have more sites use HTTPS has been out for some time. It is hard to be motivated enough to over come the technical and financial hurdles to make the move ( and for some sites those hurdles are non-trivial ). The SEO approach that Google is taking is the equivalent of hitting sites in the wallet ( in some cases that might be the literal result ). When the possibility of loosing money is involved then it is easier to get people’s attention.

This might be the single best use of the crazy Google SEO situation I’ve ever seen.

Earlier this summer Automattic talked about working towards providing all *.wordpress.com sites with HTTPS by the end of 2014. This is something that I’m really excited to see happen.

If you still aren’t supporting HTTPS for your site, I’d encourage you to map out a plan to get there. Tim Bray posted a simple outline of the why and how of switching to HTTPS. If you are looking for a more technical view of how HTTPS works check out the TLS chapter of “High Performance Browser Networking”, which is free to read online.