Google announced late last week that they are now using SSL/HTTPS as a small ranking signal within their Google search algorithm. Yes, a small ranking signal – or in the words of Google: “a very lightweight signal” which is shown to impact “fewer than 1% of global queries“. Google equated the SSL ranking signal with the Panda signal and said it carries “less weight.” Google did say they may decide to strengthen the HTTPS ranking signal over time in an attempt to give webmasters some time to switch their sites to HTTPS.
Now for those of you who run eCommerce sites and are using SSL on your checkout forms and think that there is nothing else you need to do – wrong. This ranking boost is only applied to the pages with SSL on them – which means that your product pages and content pages which aren’t using SSL aren’t getting any ranking boost. Ideally you will want to make your whole domain name, all the URLs and files associated with it, go over HTTPS.