It has been around a month since Google confirmed that they factor in the security of websites for their search rankings. Since that time, many people have been updating their sites to the HTTPS standards, but until now, nobody really had much of an idea about how important this is.
Search Engine Land has analyzed the SERPs for popular keywords, and they discovered some compelling information about just how important this added security is.
They reported that while only about 10% of pages that are crawled by Google are currently HTTPS compliant, about 30% of the pages on the first page of Google SERPs meet that standard.
Now, this can’t all be attributed to Google’s algorithms. It is likely that a good number of the pages would be ranked whether they were HTTPS or not. As sites become more popular (and profitable) they are more likely to want to secure their pages and protect their visitors better.
Whatever the case, however, it is at the least very clear that the HTTPS pages are ranking far better than others. Since it is fairly easy and free to update to HTTPS, it is difficult to see why a serious marketer would want to do it.
It seems likely that more studies will be done on this in the future, but for now at least, this is the best indication that Google is truly taking HTTPS seriously.
You can see the full report from Search Engine Land HERE.
