Home » Blog » SEO Group Coaching » Why is https important for SEO?
At this point, every website should be using HTTPS. There are some things to check on, when you make this migration, however.
Automated Transcript:
so, Lavonya had second question. Do you remember what it is or shall I ask it for you? I don’t think it was about what https is important for SEO. Okay. That was the second one. That was that laughs. Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s a good one. So if you pay close attention and actually lately, even if you don’t play Coast attention, if you visit a web page, you’ll notice that most websites run and it says, before the URL for the web says, it says, Https. Or you might see a little, like, lock appear on a website, so let me just show my website again. so, if I were using a Firefox browser here and see that little lock here, And the website starts with https. Now some websites just run off, HTTP. This is the hypertext transfer protocol which is how the web browser knows that you’re looking at a web page. But what we want for almost all of our websites is to see the http. This means you have set up what’s called an SSL certificate on your browser that encrypts data from from your browser to the web from the browser to the server that holds the website and back. So for instance if I submit If I submit a search on my website, it sends the word nofollow link to my server, which has WordPress and then returned this. There are ways for someone to intercept that signal and because I’m running HTTP that signal is encoded in a way where if someone wanted intercepted, they wouldn’t be able to read it. this is very, very important when you have logins and log outs, Where if you submit a password. between your browser and the web server, if it’s not occurring over https theoretically someone intercept that in read your password Therefore, they have your password and could login. So most websites today should be running off of an SSL certificate and should therefore be seeable through http. I bet you most of your websites already, do this. In fact, I’d even suggest most web hosts provide a free SSL, certificate for almost every website I’ve seen some websites that are old and haven’t been maintained that are running off of http. But they need to be upgraded. So, it’s not only a security issue, but as levani asked, it is an SEO issue as well. And in that Google right now is first when they first view a website, they always try to view the S https version of your page. So they assume that you’ve set this up and they want, they really want you to do it. They have made it part of their algorithm for ranking. And in fact, recently, they released a new Tool in Google. Search console that is it is the page experience report. I don’t know if any of you have got a chance to look in Google search console lately, but in the page experience report, the first thing it says is Is, is your website? Run over http. Because they really want it to happen so you should be running every website off of HTTP by installing an SSL certificate. If you don’t have one talk to your developer or your web host and see if they can issue you an SSL certificate because you’ll need it for security. God forbid, someone be able to hack your website because you’re trying to log in without an HTTP or even worse. Taking a payment or sending a credit card payment over the internet without HTTP boy, that’s really risky. So make sure you set it up but it is an SEO Factor as well. So do it for that. A couple of important points. We’ve talked about how it’s very, very important. When you set up, you can you change even a particular letter or character in your url? She always set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL. We are literally when we set up an SSL certificate on a website and changing everything from HTTP to https, we are literally changing every URL on our website. We, you know, so make sure you’re using a 301 redirect to do that. So Google knows, hey, the website is no longer on the HTTP it is now on https. How do we check that? I like this website call redirect Detective. It’s really easy. I can go in. Now, I can type in any URL. I’m doing curious ants. No, triple W, and no s. And this shows me. The steps it takes to pass through all the Reader X and then the Final Destination. So you see what happens is. It’s might be hard to read on the screen I asked for HTTP. No triple W it automatically uses a 301 permanent redirect to go to http and then uses another 301 redirect to get to http triple W. That’s the Final Destination. This should be able to, what’s that. I thought of the movie. When he said that, this should be, this should work on almost every URL you use. And so you, what I would do is check to make sure that your SSL certificate is set up. So, you have a 301 redirect that’s important because most systems by default will use a 302 redirect. 302 redirect doesn’t affect users ability to get to your page. People will still get to the right page. Problem is Google will interpret a 301 different than a 3 up to a 302 Google says, oh, this is only temporary. So I’m going to hold on to the old URL because you probably going to come back to it. But that’s not what we want. We want to tell Google, we are forever and permanently moving to this new location. So we want to use a 301 redirect. So, when you set up an SSL certificate to render your site on HTTP, please make sure that every URL uses a 301 redirect to get to the HTTP version of that URL. How does that answer your question? It’s seconds is my question. Okay. Okay good.
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