Google wants to make sure that websites people access from their site are secure. For instance, they have createdresources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites. Now they are going further At Google I/O a few months ago, they called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web. They have also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS Encryption for their sites. Over the past few months Google has been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in their search rankings. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while they give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, they will likely decide to strengthen it.
GeeksOnTime like to encourage our small business website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to help them get a small jump on their competition and keep everyone safe on the web.
Google has published detailed best practices to make site encryption easier to adopt and GeeksOnTime is happy to help.
- 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.