SSL-Certificate
Perfect SEO content is provided under current security standards. Websites without up-to-date security measures, i.e. without a TLS or SSL certificate, have been marked as insecure in browsers for quite some time. This alone should be reason enough for you to play out your content exclusively under appropriate encryption. Because such an unquestionably very negative indication can quickly be projected onto your entire company. Since security is extremely relevant for your customers on several levels and the major search engines also strongly associate their user experience as users of your content with this factor, it is no wonder that security features are now among the important ranking factors.
There are still an immense number of “black sheep” or at least problematic sites on the Internet that endanger the sensitive information of their users – especially through insecure connections or even fraudulent activities such as phishing – hack visitors or have been hacked themselves, intentionally want to introduce malware on the devices of their users or provide harmful/unwanted software for download.
Safety on the net
The major search engines – and Google in particular – want to protect their users from such bad influences directly in the search hits. That’s why they have been working on adequate security checks for websites for a long time. The search services themselves have an understandable interest in ideally not offering their user’s such pages. After all, as many web users as possible should feel comfortable with such services and use them again and again. Of course, this cannot be guaranteed, or at least not as much, if users continuously suffer damage from phishing.
Security certificates are at the heart of the major search engines’ security measures. They guarantee protected information transfer between a website and the browser used by the web visitor. User data is protected against interception and manipulation by third parties via these certificates and the associated technical encryption measures during transmission. You can easily identify a protected website by the protocol abbreviation HTTPS at the beginning of the relevant URL. In such a case, the browser additionally shows you – or in the context of your web presence, your customers – whether all content on the website is secure.
As early as 2011, Google pioneered a secure connection via SSL certificate for logged-in users. In the following year, an SSL conversion of Google Search was initiated for all users – even those who were not logged in. In August 2014, it became official: Google announced that security is a ranking factor. As a result, Google is striving for an all-around secure Internet, which makes it a logical consequence to let encrypted pages rank better than unencrypted ones.
Nevertheless, as a website owner who may not have switched over yet, you don’t have to panic. TLS/SSL encryption remains one of the immensely many ranking factors. Don’t act in haste and be sure to avoid an improperly performed backup. Such a backup may even cause your website to suffer significant ranking and traffic losses. Google itself still refers to encryption as a lighter ranking signal. A change is nevertheless inevitable to be able to play out maximum SEO-friendly content.
In addition to encrypted data transmission between the web server and the user device, other security-relevant factors flow into the ranking. For example, Google analyzes websites very closely for potential malware or phishing and issues warnings directly in the SERPs or at the latest before the corresponding pages are called up. If your company website is affected by such warnings, you will not only lose many users and prospects, but also existing customers. In addition, there is a threat of a significant loss of visibility due to the banishment from the SERPs. Therefore, you should not only pay attention to modern encryption and thus data security, but furthermore, ensure that users of your Internet presence cannot suffer any other damage.
In terms of SEO content and security, it is particularly advisable to check one’s website for hacking and to remove or adapt any hacked or compromised content and also to delete comment spam or similar content and, ideally, to prevent its occurrence from the outset.