Search Engine Optimization en vogue

Too Long; Didn't Read

There is a lot of contradictory advice on SEO. For example something as simple as whether http or https is better is up for debate. Google has themselves announced that they will <a href="https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html" target="_blank">reward sites for using HTTPS/SSL</a>. Due to Google’s dominance in the search engine space it may be safe to assume that HTTPS will improve your rank. However a conflicting ranking variable is site loading speed. HTTPS can prevent intermediate caching and requires a more lengthy handshake to complete a transaction. This is the reason that Google developed the SPDY protocol. So now we have three options to which it is not clear what mix of speed and safety will achieve the greatest respect in Google’s algorithm. That is just one search engine, other portals or engines may analyze your site very differently. Personally I have not found any statistically significant difference between HTTP or HTTPS with regards to search engine ranking.