SEO Benefit to SSL Certificate
-
Our site does not have an SSL certificate. I have read that in the process of adding one of URLs need to be redirected and that some link equity can be lost.
Implementing an SSL certificate sounds somewhat complicated and far from risk free.
Is there a tangible SEO benefit to upgrading to SSL? Will doing so help SEO in a tangible manner that justifies the cost, time and aggravation?
Thanks,
Alan
-
Just like everyone else here responded, ssl is no major ranking factor. Implemented ssl on 8 websites during the last 4-6 months and there was no change in ranking.
-
I only know clients wich are using ssl since google considers it.
I have some insights to these sight, there ist no visible change in traffic or ranking.It is not better, but its also not worser (but implemention is done right, I read that here over 60%
do it in a wrong way). What I mean - done wrong may be bad for your ranking. -
I have implemented SSL about 5 months ago, and have not seen much of a benefit. Also you have to consider that sites running SSL are invariably slower as well, although Cloudflare can help with that.
The only thing I currently like about SSL are the EV SSL certificates (the green bar with your company name) as I believe these allow some sense of authority to be seen by users.
-
Hi,
I have implemented SSL certificate three months ago but I haven't seen any tangible SEO benefits on my site.
If you are running E-commerce site then you should implement it .
Thanks
-
"If you're only doing this for SEO benefits, though, I think there are better places to spend your time and money. Google may turn up the volume on this factor over time, but the evidence for major benefits is still lacking."
^ This. This. This.
-
I'm afraid the short answer is that we don't really know. Google is pushing that direction, but sites that have taken the plunge aren't reporting much in the way of verifiable gains. As you said, there is a real risk, too, and it can complicate some things.
As Patrick said, there are many legitimate business cases for having SSL, and if you're dealing with commerce or private data, you really should look beyond the SEO aspects. If you're only doing this for SEO benefits, though, I think there are better places to spend your time and money. Google may turn up the volume on this factor over time, but the evidence for major benefits is still lacking.
-
Hi there
I have not directly, I am just going off of what Google has publicly stated.
I will say this - if you are collecting information or taking transactions, HTTPS is a best practice for those types of sites. It shows you have taken the proper steps in securing user information.
-
Hi Patrick:
Google has hundreds of ranking factors. Do you know of anyone who has implemented this switch to SSL certificate witnessed a ranking/traffic improvement as a result? -
Hi there
Yes. Google has stated they consider this a ranking factor. While not a huge one, it's still considered one, and they have come out and said "Hey, we value this, and consider it in our rankings".
A couple of resources for you:
Search Engine Land
Moz
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Entities and SEO
How do you find the correct words (entities) to explain an entity ? The words (entities) that go together within a sentence seem to be based on the specific corpus (the keyword you want to rank ) and when they are million of results it seems impossible to find what word / entity is going to explain the entity / concept I want to explain. It seems that I got a better chance at the lottery 🙂 a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Do you have any advice or software that could parse and find the words that co-occure the most often out of millions of results !! Thank you,0 -
Subdomains + SEO
Hi everyone, So a little background - my company launched a new website (http://www.everyaction.com). The homepage is currently hosted on an amazon s3 bucket while the blog and landing pages are hosted within Hubspot. My question is - is that going to end up hurting our SEO in the long run? I've seen a much slower uptick in search engine traffic than I'm used to seeing when launching new sites and I'm wondering if that's because people are sharing the blog.everyaction.com url on social (which then wouldn't benefit just everyaction.com?) Anyways, a little help on what I should be considering when it comes to subdomains would be very helpful. Thanks, Devon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EveryActionHQ0 -
Any SEO value in gTLD redirect?
So, my client is thinking of purchasing several gTLDs with second level keywords important to us. Stuff like this...we don't want .popsicles, just the domain with the second level keyword. Those cost anywhere from $20-30 right now: grape.popsicles cherry.popsicles rocket.popsicles companyname.popsicles The thinking is that it's best to be defensive, not let a competitor get the gTLD with our name in it (agreed) and not let them capitalize on a keyword-rich gTLD (hmm). The theory was that we or a competitor could buy this gTLD and redirect it to our relevant page for, say, cherry popsicles. They wonder if that would help that gTLD page rank well - and sort of work in lieu of AdWords for pages that are not ranking well. I don't think this will work. A redirected page shouldn't rank better that the page it links to...unless Google gave it points for Exact Match in the URL. Do you think they will -- does Google grade any part of a URL that redirects? Viewing this video from Matt Cutts, I surmise that a gTLD would be ranked like any other page -- if its content, inbound links, etc. support a high DA, well, ok then, you get graded like every domain. In the case of a redirect, the page would not be indexed as a standalone so that is a moot point, right? So, any competitor buying a gTLD with the hopes of ranking well against us would have to build up pagerank in that new domain...and for our purposes I see that being hugely difficult for anyone - even us. Still, a defensive purchase of some of these might not be a bad idea since it's a fairly low cost investment. Other thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jen_Floyd0 -
SEO Blow-Up After Site Redesign
I contracted with a local web design firm - a highly recommended firm - to redo my law practice's Wordpress site. The redesign was done in early April. After the redesign I saw a large drop in rankings across all of my keywords, lost internal page rank, and had a big traffic drop. The site is www.toughtimeslawyer.com. There were a couple of issues that contributed to it; but I'm not sure how to rebuild. The internal URL structure changed completely. I wasn't aware of this until the site went live. I didn't have a sitemap for about a week, then the sitemap plugin they used was not very good and showing errors in Webmaster tools. Last week, I replaced it with Yoast's SEO plugin. The biggest problem is that they setup a subdomain old.toughtimeslawyer.com, without asking me or telling me. The subdomain had all of my content on it. It was not blocked with robots.txt; and it is being cached by Google. I just discovered it today, when I was doing something in my cpanel. I assume that this is creating a duplicate content problem with Google. I'm not sure what steps to take to recover. I am especially concerned about the subdomain old.toughtimeslawyer.com and the best want to handle it with the search engines. Thanks in advance, all advice is appreciated. I've been pulling my hair out for the last few weeks over my rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ToughTimesLawyer0 -
What would your Seo tactic's be for this
Hiya guys... Just a quicken, So my forum, talknightlife.co.uk is currently 10th on google for "nightlife forum" I have about 15 back links, 26 page autority. Now what i'm trying to do, which everyone else is doing, is trying to move it up a couple of spots maybe to 5th or something. What would your tactics be, I'm disregarding all the crap I read in the forums etc, you guys on here tend to have the best explanation. Let it rip 🙂 Cheers guys Luke.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukescotty0 -
Is IP trust a factor in SEO
Hi If my website is on an IP address that has a bad reputation with AOL for email, would Google use that as a factor in where they place us in SERPs? If so, what should I do? Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0 -
Do 404 Errors hurt SEO ?
I recently did a crawl test and it listed over 10,000 pages, but around 282 of them generated 404 errors (bad links) I'm wondering how much this hurts overall SEO and if its something I should focus on fixing asap ? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RagingBull0