Google Gives Ranking Boost For Secure Sites

Google announced that going HTTPS — adding a TLS certificate (RSA 2048-bit or ECDSA) and configuring modern TLS on your site — will give you a minor ranking boost.

Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit, counting as a very lightweight signal within the overall ranking algorithm. In 2026, HTTPS is the standard and remains a lightweight ranking signal that primarily supports user trust and secure browsing. A lack of HTTPS can harm visibility and user experience, especially in modern browsers that flag insecure pages.

Google also said based on their tests for the past few months, the HTTPS signal showed positive results in terms of relevancy and ranking in Google’s search results.

As you may remember, at SMX West, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, said he’d love to make SSL a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Well, less than five months after that announcement, and while he is on an extended leave, Google is making it a reality.

SEO Concerns With Going HTTPS

Should you be concerned when switching from your HTTP to HTTPS site for SEO purposes? Not so much. Google has been telling webmasters it is safe to do so for years. But you need to take the proper steps to ensure your traffic doesn’t suffer. That means make sure to communicate to Google that you moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS. Google promises to release more documentation in the future, but for now has provided the following tips:

• Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
• Use a modern TLS certificate (RSA 2048-bit or ECDSA) and configure current TLS protocols and ciphers
• Use absolute HTTPS URLs for internal resources to ensure clarity and prevent mixed-content or canonical issues
• Use absolute HTTPS URLs for all resources to prevent mixed-content issues and ensure consistent canonicalization
• Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
• Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
• Set up 301 redirects from all HTTP URLs to their HTTPS counterparts and update canonical tags, hreflang, Open Graph, and structured data to HTTPS
• Update XML sitemaps to list HTTPS URLs and resubmit them after the migration
• Enable HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) and consider HSTS preloading once you’ve verified the migration
• Audit and fix mixed content (images, scripts, styles) so all assets load over HTTPS
• Update CDN, analytics, and advertising tags to use HTTPS endpoints
• After migrating, enable HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC) on your server or CDN to improve performance over HTTPS

Google Search Console supports HTTPS properties; add your HTTPS property, submit updated sitemaps, and review Indexing reports, Security issues, and Page experience.

One last thing: You will want to make sure to track your HTTP to HTTPS migration carefully in your analytics software and within Google Search Console,