HTTPS: How added Website Security affects your SEO
Nowadays everyone is concerned about the security of their devices and software while browsing the internet. Apart from hacking, virus, malware, and spyware issues, security can also be a major factor affecting your SEO performances very deeply. Therefore, good security (HTTPS) is something we should take care of while doing SEO for our web pages.
While doing a Google search, better encryption and entrusted third parties are not the only things ordinary searchers are concerned about but these signs matter significantly in accelerating the standards for online interaction, including SEO.
Sometime back in 2014 at Google’s yearly I/O conference, Google Webmaster Pierre Far explained “HTTPS Everywhere,” pointing that “all communications should be secure by default” and that queries required to be pushed further for systematizing HTTPS and making websites extra secured on both ends.
We are in the middle of 2018, so, how does this influence your SEO now, and how is the switching of HTTP to HTTPS valuing its performance? To solve that, we will have to delve deeper and analyze why Google suggested this development.
The ABC’s: HTTP vs HTTPS
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) are both fundamental structures that help us to portray and get details on the web, generally on a regular website. Mainly HTTPS was developed to function similarly to HTTP, but now it comes with the advantage of implementing an additional layer of security using a technology called Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, to transfer secure data.
SSL is particularly connected with things like verifications, online transactions, and authentications. Providing security details like a credit card, passwords, and numbers over HTTPS needs SSL to stop cyberpunks, hackers, and others from accessing your financial details, unlike HTTP.
SEO Advantages of Switching to HTTPS
Implementing Google’s procedure to change to HTTP is, safe and easy, smart choice for anybody, particularly users having e-commerce integration. Implementation of the same will help your site become secure (and your audiences), but along with those implementations benefits of additional SEO, benefits can also be considered.
1) Better Rankings
Although transferring to HTTPS may not help you in improving your ranking that effectively at this moment, but, most SEO experts suggest it as a crucial part of an in-depth SEO planning and strategy. Furthermore, as Google’s search engine algorithms have turned innovative and their desire in getting pushed for more secure internet, it may happen that we may witness a positive effect of HTTPS on search over time.
2) Referral Data
Unlike HTTP Google Analytics integrates in a better way with HTTPS, the security details of the website that assigned to you are stored—conveying that sources of reference won’t surface like “direct traffic.” Especially in the case of SEO, HTTPS draws an edge over HTTP.
3) Security and Privacy
Similar to any quality security setup, HTTPS makes both the website operant and its visitors feel secure. The security layer prevents users from experiencing any financial losses and data breaches as well as an impairment of your site’s authenticity or position on the internet.
The Process of Changing from HTTP to HTTPS
Transferring your site from HTTP to HTTPS is an unequivocal mechanism.
1. Buy an SSL certificate.
2. Implement your SSL certificate on your site’s hosting server.
3. Cross-check all of your URLs. Any link not relocated from HTTP to HTTPS will collapse after the transfer
4. Send an alert to Google followed by the other search engines about your website modification through setting up 301 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS. Through this process, visitors who have saved a page on your website is by default redirected to the new HTTPS URL after you complete the switch. Since the webmaster treats both HTTP and HTTPS individually, if you are operating sites that use both, you will need to create a separate Search Console property for each one.
You must be comfortable to set up the switch and secure your website. However, because of the intricate structure of SSL and other aspects like some important plugins, there are things you would like to delve deeper into and alter.
And last but not the least, it is way better to remain dedicated and try to be a part of such transformation.