Google is striving hard and investing a lot to provide security to the users; which means visitors coming over to use Google, Gmail, Google Drive etc will now have a safer connection. Recently it had switched over to industry’s leading security measure, the HTTPS encryption automatically. Google said, “Not only is the Google site but it also trying to make the entire internet a safer place for browsing. It has made sure that websites that are accessed through Google will be secure in the near future. Lately it had created ways for the webmasters to avoid and fix safety violations in their websites. Not just this, it wants to move ahead on the safety issues and for this, it had announced “HTTPS everywhere” over the internet.
After this announcement, many webmasters have switched over to HTTPS instead of HTTP which is indeed encouraging. Google has been testing over the sites, taking into consideration that the websites use HTTPS encrypted connections, as a signal to the search ranking algorithms. The test gave positive results; therefore Google had started using the HTTPS as a ranking signal. However the signal is not very strong as of now and affecting only 1% of the search queries across the globe. This signal is carrying very less weight as compared to the other signals, like high level content signal. This will provide time to the webmasters to switch over to HTTPS from HTTP. In future Google has decided to make the signals stronger, so that all the webmasters switch over to HTTPS from HTTP and make this internet a safer place.
For those webmasters, who would be interested in switching over, Google will be publishing a detailed plan in the coming weeks to make the TLS (transport layer security) switching easier. Below given are some basic points to start with and common errors which need to be avoided:
• Decide whether you need a single or multi-domain certificate.
• Better to use the 2048-bit key certificates.
• Make use of relative URLS for assets which lie on the same domain.
• For all the other domains use protocol relative URLs.
• Don’t use robots to block your HTTPS website from crawling.
• Check out more options and procedures on Google, on how to change the website’s address.
• Let the indexing of your pages happen where-ever possible. Avoid adding any non-indexing Meta tag.
If a website is already having HTTPS on its server, its security level can be tested using the Qualys Lab Tool. If the webmasters are concerned about their sites performance and TLS, they can have a look at its TLS first and then contact Google for further support.