I just got an offer from my hosting provider to switch to SSL. I know there were a lot of buzz that supposedly Google will be ranking SSL sites higher. Practically speaking, has anyone seen any changes after switching to SSL? Not in theory, but for real?
I haven't seen any changes and I'm not surprised. Immediately Google announced that SSL might affect rankings, I knew it wouldn't affect rankings to a noticeable degree (if at all) since they had already announced it and it was so simple to implement. In my opinion, if a ranking factor will affect Google rankings significantly, Google won't announce it publicly. They will do their utmost to protect it from leaking out to anyone that might have an interest in ranking sites in Google for profit. Some bloggers have also concluded that SSL doesn't boost rankings even before Google announced that it's now a ranking factor.
SSL won't help you according to me... Such certificate is used by websites that offer online payments (like PayPal!) or any information that is secured...
Google won't give it away that easy. It is just a ranking signal, and I believe backlinks from relevant, high PR and domain authority sites are more likely to boost a site PR than https/ssl alone. Someone once told me that if it is that easy then it will just have minimal effect. Make sense, right?
Ah, so I'm definitely not the crazy one when I tried to explain to sooo many people that just because Google announced HTTPs as a ranking factor doesn't mean that all should jump and get their own SSL certificates. Of course the results are insignificant, how powerful can 1/200+ be? Now, I did get some feedbacks from local websites getting a more significant change but we all know that local SEO can experience much sharper up and downs. Apart from that its the expected little to no results. Adding even more to that, in a recent Hangout, John Mueller from Google himself explained that the new SSL owners should not expect any significant change and HTTPs is quite a weak ranking factor.
People should not expect just to change their URL to https and expect the ranking to change, it is just one factor of the many other factors to be implemented.
Google stated that sites shouldn't expect a increase in certain search queries as the ranking factor for SSL certificates is quite low, as they want to give time for webmasters to implement it.
OK then. I hear a consensus here. Kind of what I thought the deal was. Thanks everyone for the replies.
Agreed with some of the previous comments. No change, but it did make us think about the sites that should have it for business reasons.
I read post of Google Webmasters Blog post as HTTPS as a ranking signal at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
If your website stores no user data then SSL won't do anything to your ranking. Some of my sites which store user data have seen a slight improvement after switching to SSL while the ones that don't I've seen no change.
I think this depends on the nature of your site. As said above, Google has confirmed that it is now a signal it monitors, but a weak one, and it's likely to be more relevant to retailers than a blog. We have been looking at the placement of clients and their competition in Google results, and while it's hard to be certain of the reasons (there might be another ten factors to consider) there is no doubt that when looking for a product or retailer, those appearing in the first page increasingly seem to have SSL. All anyone can say is that it certainly won't do you any harm to implement this now, if you can afford to do so.
Money wise SSL's do not cost much those days, problem comes to dedicated IP's if you don't want to use SNI (modern Linux OS support that). As we all know IPv4 are close to end, and older browsers or Windows version etc do not support that feature.
It's such a minute difference that you'll hardly notice it in rankings. Yes Google announced using SSL will be apart of there algorithm but trust me it makes such a small difference it's almost irrelevant where or not you choose to use SSL.