14 DAY TRIAL // Google's Webmaster team has just published new details, amping up support and the company's search engine technology for Web pages served via secure HTTPS connections.
Back in August 2014, Google announced that the presence of HTTPS encryption would favor a website's search engine ranking score. While a small boost, the decision to include HTTPS in the search results ranking system showed Google's strategy of pushing HTTPS as the default protocol for delivering content on the Web.
HTTPS, if properly implemented, helps website owners guard against man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks against its service or users.
Google's ongoing dedication for a stronger and more secure Internet was again put on display today when the company announced a series of new rules that will favor pages hosted on HTTPS over similar pages on the same website delivered via HTTP.
Google reinforces support for HTTPS
"Browsing the web should be a private experience between the user and the website, and must not be subject to eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, or data modification," said Googler Zineb Ait Bahajji. "This is why we’ve been strongly promoting HTTPS everywhere."
As of today, Google has a new set of rules put in place to deal with HTTPS content in its search results listings. If the Googlebot finds two pages that seem to have the same content but are delivered via HTTP and HTTPS, the HTTPS version will now be favored by default and showed in Google's search results.
The only times when the HTTP version will be shown is if the HTTPS page:
■ Doesn’t contain insecure dependencies. ■ Doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. ■ Doesn’t have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page. ■ Doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag. ■ Doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs. ■ The sitemaps list the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL. ■ The server has a valid TLS certificate. ■ Isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt.