Google Promoting HTTPS

Get Better Indexing from Google with this Easy Way

Before Google gets the best of you again, learn of a new change that could affect the way your website ranks.

Well actually, if we’re honest here, this is a change that Google has always considered important…but now considers a top priority.

It’s a security update, but could also affect the placement of your web pages on search engines.

Over the years, Google has been working to make the web more secure, and offer better search and browsing experiences for users. In fact, for a while we’ve known that many of the big websites such as YouTube, Gmail and Google have secure connections, but now Google has also decided to give a slight advantage to those website owners who have listed HTTPS URLS in the search results.

What’s The Purpose Of Doing This?

The aim here is to ensure that searching the web remains a private experience between users and the websites; the purpose is to protect users from eavesdropping and hackers. This is why Google is currently promoting HTTPS and why we at No BS strongly recommend that our customers register with an HTTPS URL. There’s also another reason why moving to HTTPS is so important. This reason is…

HTTP Sites Are No Longer Secure

As of July 2018, Chrome has now marked all sites with HTTP as ‘not secure’. Normally Chrome displays a neutral icon information but with this new change, it now warns users in the address bar with extra notifications. With HTTPS encrypted sites, Chrome currently marks it with a green lock icon and a sign that says ‘Secure’. While Google has been trying to get people to move away from encrypted sites for many years, it appears this new change will make it more forceful. The down-ranking of unencrypted sites started back in 2015, and in 2016 the Chrome team gave a warning for unencrypted password fields.

This move to making HTTP sites unsecure was considered by the percentage of sites adopting the HTTPS encryption. It’s said that 81 out of the 100 top websites were defaulting theirs to HTTPS.

The idea of HTTPS encryption is to protect the channel between the website you’re visiting and your browser. This is to ensure that no middle person can spy on what you’re doing or tamper with your traffic. Without the HTTPS encryption, someone who has access to your ISP or router could gather any information from your website or add viruses or malware to your webpages.

To help you implement the encryption from HTTP to HTTPS, this can be done via services such as Let’s Encrypt. This helps to give sites less excuses to adopt the change implemented by Chrome.

What’s The Next Step?

Google will continue promoting HTTPS and look for these specific URL addressed web pages to rank them better than others without the HTTPS configuration. Even websites that may have two URLS, one with the more typical HTTP form, and the other with HTTPS, Google will choose to index the HTTPS URL over the more conventional one; that is,so long as the website doesn’t have the following:
• Contain insecure links or pages
• Have blocks to keep the robots.txt from crawling it.
• Have a rel=”canonical” link to the HTTP page.
• Contain a noindex robots meta tag.
• Have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs.
• The sitemaps doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL.

Although Google will prefer the HTTPS version, you can make it clear to the search engines by having us redirect your HTTP to a new HTTPS version and implementing an HSTS header on the server. It is a simple fix that can help rank your website better in the search engines.

Bottom Line

This is actually a very good thing that Google is taking action on, but we all need to do our part. By showing the HTTPS pages in search results, Google will decrease insecure connections. Please contact us if you have questions about this new change from Google.