3 Steps To Capitalise On HTTPS Google Love
Google have been banging on about https as a ranking signal for quite some time (and so have I). Well it became official last week. Here’s what you need to know.
1. Get an SSL certificate for your web server.
For most businesses you will get these through your hosting company. They can cost between a few dollars per month to several hundred per year. The amount you pay depends on things like the level of security and the warranty provided to you if anything goes wrong with the certificate.
2. Setup your web server at HTTPS.
You need to get your hosting company to do this as well unless you are hosting your self. Make sure you setup HTTPS version in webmaster tools and don’t forget to redirect your www version of the https site to the root. Also make sure you have setup a sitemap in webmaster tools with all https URLs.
3. Redirect the HTTP versions.
This is extremely important. If you don’t do this you will have a completely duplicated site and the new https version will not inherit any of the link love. Depending on the size of your site you may then want to manually remove it from the Google index but for most sites if you have done the 301 redirect properly Google will remove it automatically.
Importance of HTTPS for SEO?
If your content is rubbish it’s more important to fix that first. All the security in the world won’t help you if you don’t have great, unique content.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
