Having an SSL Certificate Benefits SEO

Google has officially announced that having an SSL Certificate for your website will help it rank better within organic search results.

Google says that having an SSL Certificate for your website will give it a small ranking benefit.  At the moment, it won’t give you a huge advantage over your non-secure competition but in the future Google will entertain the idea of giving secure website a greater ranking boosts as more sites adopt HTTPS.

Why Does Google Care About SSL Certificates?

Google has become a huge internet authority. They’re taking this opportunity to convince website owners to make their websites more secure.

Okay, SSL Certificates Are Important, But What Are They?

Simply put, an SSL certificate encrypts the back-and-forth communication between a website and its visitors.  Without an SSL certificate, all information being transferred to and from a website is sent as plain text and can be read by anyone with the appropriate software within your network, at your internet provider, or on the web server’s network.

One easy way to tell if a website is behind an SSL Certificate is to look for https:// (instead of http://) when visiting a website, or to look for some form of lock icon to the left of the link in your browsers address bar. FYI, the S in HTTPS refers to secure.