Most website owners at this point know they should be on HTTPS. It increases user security, gives you a slight ranking boost in Google and ensures you don’t show a warning in the new chrome browser. However, with the news this week there will be an even larger reason to switch. According to the SEM Post, Gary Illyes said that HTTPS is super important and they do have plans to improve it and make it stronger ranking factor in the future.
Now, Gary didn’t go into detail about how much more important. We do know that in the past it has been stated that it is small ranking factor which acts more like a tie-breaker between websites. I tend to feel it is currently a little more heavily weighted than that (or at least has a larger aggregate impact when considering it’s implications on the greater picture). When you change every page on your website so that it has the upper hand in a Google ranking tie-breaking situation, that has a big impact overall. Think about the shear number of tie-breaking situations each website is in for all of their keywords. Some of our clients have millions of keywords that are hyper-competitive. If their website wins the tie on all of those keywords, that means big gains.
Outside of ranking better, both Chrome and Firefox are finding ways to deter website owners from running their websites on HTTP. As noted, Chrome 42 will be showing a warning and Mozilla has announced plans to deprecate HTTP in Firefox. Here we see their 3 phased plan.
This is one more very important reason why people might want to switch to HTTPS. I recommend all websites get it done as soon as possible.
