Google Now Using HTTPS As A (Very Slight) Ranking Signal In Search To Encourage More Encryption

from the pros-and-cons dept

Back in April, we wrote about claims that Google was considering giving a boost in its search rankings to sites that are encrypted. Today, it officially announced the policy, noting that the company has been testing it for a little while and thinks that it works well. The weighting is very tiny, but the company makes it clear that it will likely increase that over time, and the current low ranking is more of a "grace period" to encourage more sites to encrypt. Google also makes clear that its reason for doing this is to encourage greater encryption to make the entire web more safe and secure:

For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. 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 we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

When we wrote about it back in April, I found it a bit surprising that Google would do this, given that, historically, it has always said its search rankings were entirely focused on quality. You could, perhaps, make an argument that a site that uses SSL is more likely to be a high quality site, but Google doesn't even appear to be making that argument. As a site that has already strongly moved to SSL, this might (marginally) help our Google rankings (not that we actually get much traffic from Google in the first place), and getting much more of the web encrypted is a good thing in general.

It still seems, though, that for all the good this does, others will now make use of this as an argument for other kinds of "nudging" behavior by Google. For years, the legacy entertainment industry has pushed Google to better rank "good" sites and to downrank "pirate" sites -- which the industry still seems to think is a simple black and white calculation (it's not). Google can point out that SSL v. non-SSL is obvious, but I fully expect those who seem to think Google should be designed in their own interests, as opposed to those of Google's users, to jump on this as proof that Google can solve other problems.

This still is a good move, though. Encouraging more encryption on the web is always the right move. I'm just still a bit surprised that Google would take this step, and wonder how others will react to it.

Filed Under: encrypt everything, encryption, https, search ranking, ssl