Google Prioritising HTTPS over HTTP

In a bid to further protect its users from cyber attacks, Google has announced that it will start prioritizing secure HTTPS URLs over regular HTTP ones, even if they don’t have any links pointing to them.

The search engine giant, Google, started giving HTTPS pages a bump in its search results back in 2014 but have announced today that they will now seek to ensure these become more standard in search results.

It’s important to note that, pages without an HTTPS counterpart will not be affected in search results.

With this in mind, Google is increasingly keen to see more secure web pages surfacing in its search engine and so future changes could be on the horizon at a later date.

“We’d like to announce that we’re adjusting our indexing system to look for more HTTPS pages. Specifically, we’ll start crawling HTTPS equivalents of HTTP pages, even when the former are not linked to from any page.”

If you would like to know what constitutes as a good HTTPS website, Google has also created a guide for you, including things like not redirecting visitors to or through an insecure page.