SSL Now Ranking Factor in Google Search Engine

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.

You may wonder why you do not have to change inbound links coming to your website. The reason for this is that we can handle this with a little code in our htaccess file. This will automatically redirect all visitors coming to our site to our SSL. You can try it here at a1websitepro.com enter this address into your browser and you will see that you are automatically redirected to https from http. http://a1websitepro.com

[code]
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R,L][/code]

More Benefits to adding a SSL to your website

Once you have an SSL on your website you can then start embedding iframes on your facebook page. You can check out what I mean on the A1WEBSITEPRO facebook page. If you do not have an SSL you would not be able to do that. If you have a store you can actually embed it on your facebook page.

How to get an SSL on your website

Shared Server SSL

The process is easy if you are on a shared hosting plan. Contact your hosting company and tell them that you want an SSL installed on your website. You will then be assigned a dedicated ip address for your website and your hosting company will install the certificate for you.

Dedicated Server SSL

The implementation of an SSL on a dedicated server has more steps. You can find complete instruction in this article “How do I install a SSL certificate on my Dedicated Server”.

If you are an A1WEBSITEPRO customer with a dedicated server contact me and I will install it for you. I will also set up your htaccess file so that all your visitors are directed to your SSL. Cost $150

Max’s special SSL plugin to make your entire wordpress https:// without having to edited every post that you ever made.