Over the past few months Google have been carrying out tests taking into account whether sites use secure or encrypted connections as a indicator in our search ranking algorithms.

Following on from this research, Google have seen great results and have decided that they want to adapt their current algorithm to incorporate this. Google states that they want to convince you that all communications should be secure by default. For now, the actually affect having a HTTPS website makes on the rankings is quite lightweight affecting less than one percent of global queries. This also doesn’t mean that you will necessarily rank lower than a HTTPS site, as long as your information is relevant and the content is of high quality.

Over time, Google may decide to strengthen the affect on rankings this has, because they would like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.