Are google really giving away ranking upgrades for security savvy webmasters? In all honest, it is somewhat of an unknown. Although there has been recent articles on tech sites, suggesting that Google are looking at promoting sites which are https secure in search engine rankings.
Although this doesn’t automatically guarantee an improved search engine position for your sites keywords, it is rumored to contribute to your overall SEO score.
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, has long since been talking about this internet utopia, where all sites, no matter what their content may be would be secure.
Even if the site you are visiting is not handling sensitive information, there is still the possibility of the site being comprised an you being redirected if the site has not yet implemented an SSL certificate. In light of this Google are supposedly rewarding SSL secure sites with extra kudos.
There has been no official news release from Google to suggest this is in fact planned for the future.. But if you are conscious about your SEO rankings and your visitors security then its time to invest!
It’s also worth pointing out that the days of SSL slowing down a websites response time is a thing of the past. The overheads of processing an SSL nowadays is minimal.
I’ve already implemented an SSL certificate here at mikeswl.info and I’m now working on switching the other sites I manage over. Will you be switching?