Google’s commitment against the “pitfalls of the web” is well known to all: for years, the safety of users’ browsing has been one of the main objectives of the most popular search engine in the world; so much so that services like Gmail and Youtube have been using secure connections for a long time.
Recently, another confirmation of what has just been said has arrived from the upper floors of Mountain View: HTTPS pages will be favored in indexing, compared to the equivalent http.
The preference for secure protocols over “discovery” browsing is not new, but Google in its latest announcement has increased the dose by explaining that when it finds two URLs of the same domain with similar content, the only difference is that one of the two uses a secure https connection, this last page will be preferred to the first in the returned results.
All this provided that:
- do not contain insecure content
- these URLs are not blocked from crawling by specific indications in the robots.txt file
- there is no redict set to an unsecured http connection
- does not have a rel = ”canonical” link to an http page
- does not contain the indication “noindex” for the metatags
- it must not have on-host outlinks pointing to http pages
- the sitemap includes the https url, or does not include the http url
- the server has a valid TLS certificate
Precisely the first point is the most edgy: many sites contain images, embed codes, videos and other material that is not always safe.
To ride the wave of this preference, one of Google’s SEO Tips is to set up a redirect to the “safe” version of the site.