Google announced August 6th of this year that an SSL on your website will affect where you rank in their search engine. For those that took the Web Development Strategy course sponsored by A1WEBSITEPRO you learned that making your registration private is not the greatest thing to do. Why? Because it is a warning signal that the owner of this website may be a spammer hiding their identity. So if you want to have a private registration you should even give more consideration to having an SSL. You should also consider making the registration of your website public so as to not give the wrong impression to the search engines. We will talk more on that in a later post. In this post we are going to talk more about the SSL and its ranking factor in the Google search engine.
SSL Now Ranking Factor of Trust
An SSL confirms that you are a real person or a real company. When you go to a website and you see the little lock at the top of the page by the address it lets you know that your connection to that website is secure. SSL's are issued by a 3rd party and come with an insurance policy of $100,000 or $1 million dollars. When you are on a website with an SSL you are on a website that has a responsible webmaster. If you have an SSL on your website already and you see that the padlock is broken please refer to our article "Finding the Non Secure Items on Your Website". You can be sure that the other search engines will follow suit when it comes to SSL's on websites.The Impact of Google's Ranking Factor on SSL's
Less than 1% of Google's algorithm will consider the SSL on your website but that may go up in the future. Google will still give priority to quality content and well written articles. So if you are writing a similar article as your competitor and they have an SSL and you don't, guess who's articles is going to be first? Thats right, theirs is! SSL's are cheap but there are some things that you need to consider.The upside and downside or implementing an SSL on your website
Here is a little chart to help you understand the benefits of having an SSL but letting you know the curves. You will have to change your URL in Google webmaster tools and Google analytics. Ironically your do not have to do it in your Bing webmaster tools.| With SSL | Without SSL | |
| More Visitors | Yes | No |
| Visitors Trust your Information More | Yes | No |
| Change URL to https:// Google Analytics | Yes | No |
| Change URL's in Website from http to https | Yes | No |
| Change URL to https:// Google Webmaster Tools | Yes | No |
| Change URL to https:// Bing Webmaster Tools | No | No |
| Change URL to https:// On all Social Network Platforms | No | No |
| Change URL to https:// On all Inbound Links to Your Website | No | No |
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R,L]