Google has announced it will factor into search rankings whether a website is secured with HTTPS, though the score will be weighted somewhat less than the relative quality of a site’s content.
Google recently switched to HTTPS by default for its search and has been working toward broader efforts aimed at securing the web in general.
“For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, 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 only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.” – Excerpted from a post on Google’s official blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
Of course, migrating to HTTPS necessitates special consideration for protocol-relative URLs and probably means more relative URLs rather than absolute paths, which much of the web relies on. Mixing HTTP assets in an HTTPS site will throw a security warning in Internet Explorer, for example. Here’s one limited workaround:
http://www.paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
