Google’s John Mueller deflated the suggestion that an SSL certificate would “boost” a website’s SEO, stating unequivocally that an SSL certificate does not boost your SEO.
Post on Mastodon About SSL and SEO
The encounter happened on Mastodon, where a member called EncryptedFence published:
“Increase your website’s SEO and reputation with a must-have security measure: SSL certificate –
Don’t miss out on the benefits! Get an SSL certificate today and keep your website secure.”
Google Senior Search Analyst/Head of Search Relationships John Mueller responded:
“@EncryptedFence this doesn’t “increase your website’s SEO”, sorry.”
Doesn’t SSL certificate increase SEO?
SSL, which stands for Secure Sockets Layer, is an encrypted communications standard (also known as a protocol) for secure Internet connections.
An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that certifies (authenticates) the identity of a website, it certifies that a browser is connecting to the correct server.
The SSL certificate plays an important role in the secure transfer of data over the Internet.
Google encourages HTTPS
Google made a major push to help the Internet publish data securely, for a number of reasons, most notably user security and privacy.
One obstacle to adopting HTTPS was the process of obtaining an SSL certificate was that the process was somewhat technical and confusing.
Many publishers preferred to wait to adopt the standard because it seemed unnecessary for websites that were not involved in making financial transactions.
Google responded by incentivizing the adoption of secure standards by making HTTPS a ranking factor in 2014.
Google makes HTTPS a stronger signal
Google encouraged the SEO community by promising that it might make HTTPS a stronger ranking factor.
Google wrote in 2014:
“At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for ‘HTTPS everywhere’ on the web.
We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS or Transport Layer Security) on their website, which is encouraging.
For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been testing whether sites use secure and encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms.
We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now, it’s just a very light signal, affecting less than 1% of global queries and weighing less than other signals, such as high-quality content, while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS.
But over time, we may decide to tighten it up, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.”
Google said it may decide to strengthen the HTTPS signal.
The immediate and widespread adoption of HTTP essentially meant that the SEO community responded, “I’m going to force you to do this!”
The response was overwhelmingly positive, and SSL certificates flew off the digital shelves like discounted TVs on a Black Friday.
Won’t SSL Increase Your SEO?
If HTTPS is a ranking factor, why did John Mueller claim that SSL certificates do not increase SEO?
A ranking factor, after all, is a criterion that Google uses to decide whether or not a website ranks for a search query.
So anything that is a ranking factor will boost SEO, right?
Well, it’s not like that.
Some ranking factors, such as HTTPS, are extremely light.
Everyone agrees that links from other sites are an important ranking factor.
Therefore, it is not a mental stretch to accept the fact that other ranking factors are so slight as to play a minimal role in determining how high a website will rank.
Another consideration about HTTPS as a weak SEO boost is that virtually all sites today use HTTPS.
This creates the situation where any ranking bonus derived from using HTTPS is essentially canceled out.
Google’s John Mueller has been consistent on this point about the relative weakness of the HTTPS ranking signal.
For example, in 2019 he answered a question about SSL certificates where a company claimed that the lack of a certificate would cause Google to drop a site in Google search results.
“Without an SSL certificate, Google is likely to leave your website in search results”
Mueller answered:
“Yes, this is wrong.
HTTPS is not a factor in deciding whether or not to index a page, at all.
We use HTTPS as a lightweight ranking factor and having HTTPS is great for users.
A free certificate from Let’s Encrypt works just as well.”
Once again with the nuance of SEO…
There has been a lot of confusion about HTTPS as a ranking factor.
Some people claimed it’s a tiebreaker for all else being equal. Although HTTPS is so commonly used today that it’s hard to think of a link that could be broken.
It’s probably easier to understand if you consider that if links can be a strong signal, this means that other factors, such as HTTPS, can be a weak signal, with no real boost to SEO.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Ollyy
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