Google Announcement – HTTPS Pages to be Indexed First before HTTP Pages

Google, being one of the most used search engines, what does it try to achieve with its efforts? Undoubtedly, it is great user experience. For this search engine, nothing counts more than providing good user experience. Even though it does allow businesses to earn profits and be in the limelight, it does not let any of this happen at the cost of compromising the user experience. Along with the experience, one other significant aspect that Google focuses on is user security. This is especially evident in the last few years. The search engine has not stepped back from taking some measures or the other almost all the time, to make the web as secure as possible for any internet user.

One activity that highlights Google’s improved security effort is the boost in ranking given to HTTPS URLs in search results. What do you think is the intent behind this? It’s quite simple. Google very well understands that any internet user expects his privacy to be maintained while he browses a particular website, without having to worry about anyone tampering with information or having any scope of data modification. To enforce this, Google is vigorously promoting HTTPS.

This can be verified by checking the announcement made by Google recently that it plans to modify its indexing system. It prefers to look for more HTTPS pages. This means that priority will be assigned to HTTPS pages over HTTP ones to rank for a specific search. The search engine will mainly crawl HTTPS equivalents of HTTP pages. This is done even if the former is not linked to from any of the pages.

How does this work? The search engine checks if there are two URLs of the same domain that have the same content but are served on different protocol schemes. If this is the case, then Google will index the HTTPS URL. So if you do have one with the HTTPS URL, you stand higher chances of being ranked for any search, obviously making it favorable for you.

There are some conditions that come along that are:

It does not consist of insecure dependencies.

It is not blocked for crawling by robots.

It does not redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page.

It does not have a rel=”canonical” link to the HTTP page.

It does not consist of a noindex robots meta tag.

It does not have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs.

The sitemap lists the HTTPS URL or does not list the HTTP version of the URL.

The server has a valid TLS certificate.

Even though this could be a bit uncomfortable for many websites, it is an essential step taken by Google. It is with an effort to make the web as secure as possible for internet users. This allows people to browse through the internet to check through whatever they want without having to worry about anyone tampering with their privacy. They know for sure that what they search for and their dealings with any website are completely private. This eventually develops a strong trust and reliability.

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