How much would you spend to get 1% more from Google?
August 18, 2014
As per the latest report of Net, Market Share Google holds, around 68% of Search Engine Market Share followed by Baidu are at 11% and Yahoo at 6.65%.
Google has always topped the chart and dominated the search engine market through its foresight, business acumen and continuous focus on better user experience.
It won’t be unfair to say ‘What Google does today, Search Engine Market does tomorrow!’
More than hundreds of millions of websites’ fate resides on the algorithms of Google which they never disclose. In the SEO industry, it’s widely acknowledged that Google considers about 200+ algorithm factors to determine its search rankings. The factors can be broadly classified into 1) Domain Factors 2) Page level factors 3) Site level factors 4) Backlink Factors 5) UX or User Interaction 6) Brand Signal 7) Social Signal and 8) Special Algorithm Factors
‘Safe Search’ is one of the important points which falls under Special Algorithm factors.
On 7th August, Google took a major step to provide its visitors with a safe and secure experience while transacting online. This is a signal from Google for not spending more, but to get your website secured before spending more on it!
For the first time in the history of Google, it declared an algorithm factor which it would take under consideration – ‘Secure Encrypted HTTPS connection’. As per the announcement made by Google on its official webmaster blog forum, ‘Security is a top priority for Google…. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.’
Here is the list of basic tips provided by Google:
- 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
- Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
- Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
- Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the no index robots meta tag.
Google has also updated Google Webmaster Tools to better handle HTTPS sites and the reporting on them.
Google webmaster trends analysts explained that whether or not a site is secure by default will only have a small effect on its ranking ( 1% effect) – at least for now – while advising that this factor is likely to become more important in future, once enough time for webmasters to upgrade has elapsed.
With the rapid growth in Cyber Crime, no doubt ‘Safe Search’ factor will gradually get more importance in time to come. Google or other search engines will play a proactive role in providing their users a safe cyber experience and will penalize the sites violating their prescribed ‘dos & dont’s.
It has been observed that many organizations avoid encryption due to cost concerns or fear of slowing website response time, but such cost and performance issues are no longer relevant! There are now high-speed encryption technologies available that mean cost and speed need no longer be an issue.
Every company wants to rank favorably on Google, so it’s in their best interest to ensure web pages are encrypted as prescribed by them ( Google ). Use an SSL comparison chart and get the detailed features of the available SSL certificates before making an ultimate purchasing decision.
No more delay!
Secure your website, Secure your brand reputation and Secure your site users’ data. Find out more details on SSL.
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Sources: Google Webmaster Blog, Backlinko, Search Engine Land, Internal Assessments
