David Towers

About David Towers

Google confirms HTTPS as a new ranking signal: What are the implications?

On August 6 2014, Google announced that it is starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal within the search results.

While on the face of it, this might not seem like big news, it’s another instance of Google using its influence to put pressure on websites to conform to what it considers best practice.

Google has said that right now HTTPS is a very lightweight signal which will affect less than 1% of search queries globally, but it has stated that this may change over time as Google encourages all site owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS.

As a result of this, we anticipate that secure and encrypted connections will become the norm for all websites in the future.

Has Hummingbird changed SEO forever?

When Google announced at the end of September that Hummingbird had been live for a month or so, many questioned how such a significant change could have happened without it having been detected earlier.

Amit Singhal, Head of Google’s ranking team, talked about Hummingbird being the first time a completely new algorithm had been implemented since 2001 and that it impacted 90% of search queries.

However, the visible impact of this algorithm change has been less significant than many recent algorithm updates, such as the May 2012 Penguin update.

Has the impact of encrypted search been consistent by sector?

At the end of September, Google confirmed the roll-out of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypted search to all users.

In short, this means that keyword-level data for organic (non-paid) Google traffic will no longer be provided. Consequently, website owners will no longer be able to view the keywords a visitor used in Google to find their website.

This announcement from Google will have a huge impact on the industry, with search marketers around the world rethinking metrics to track SEO performance.