I have read somewhere, that there are
200 of ranking factors which you have to follow in order to get your website ranked good on the
search engines especially Google.
But the number of 200 is not for the standing at the same. Now it is 201. :(
Do you know about the SSL? Are you using it?
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is actually a protocol to cryptograph data sent over the Web (e.g., over the HTTP protocol), to make it more secure. till now it is used by some big websites and shopping sites especially into the payment processing pages. Also some websites uses SSL in the user login, authentication and so on.
A few months ago, Google announced that it will start using SSL as a ranking factor. Here’s a quotation from the
official announcement:
Beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.
We want to go even further. 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 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.
So, according to it, you must be use an SSL certificate, if you care about your search ranking.