Google announced Wednesday that sites with HTTPS encryption will get a minor ranking boost, a move to make the web more secure.
Google, the world's largest internet search provider, announced a new move to make the web much safer. In an official blog post Wednesday, the internet search titan said it is giving a minor ranking boost to sites with HTTPS certification. Google hopes the move will encourage web developers to adopt the technology that protects sites against serious threats like virus, malware, hackers.
Google originally revealed its "HTTPS everywhere" initiative during its I/O keynote in June. The aim is to make the web more secure by encouraging sites to have secure, encrypted connections, like Google's Search, Gmail and Drive. The slight boost in the overall ranking algorithm is currently in its initial stages with Google testing the tech on less than 1 percent of global queries. This is only to give web developers enough time before Google finally decides to encourage all websites to switch from HTTP to HTTPS.
HTTPS, also known as HTTPS over TLS or Transport Layer Security, is adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on a website. Sites that use HTTP certification are prone to virus attacks and are easy to exploit.
Users are widely dependant on the information stored online, courtesy of the competitive cloud storage services. Computers are also used to store enormous amounts of confidential information such as banking details, hospital records, identity details and more. Weak encryptions on the websites expose users to the risk of identity theft.
Google also tipped web developers with certain SEOs that will help keep the site's traffic intact, along with a promise to release more details in the upcoming weeks. Few important tips are listed below via Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
-Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
-Use 2048-bit key certificates
-Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
-Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
-Don't block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
-Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
Google also pointed the existing HTTPS website owners towards new tools that can test the site's security level and configuration as well as the site's performance.
