Five months ago Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team said he’d love to make SSL a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.
Well, Google has made that a reality.
HTTPS as a ranking signal.
Google has announced that switching to HTTPS will give you a minor boost in search engine ranking.
At the moment Google is only counting HTTPS as a “very lightweight signal” within the overall ranking algorithm.
Based on their tests, Google says it has an impact on “fewer than 1% of global queries”.
They said, “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”.
Google also stated, based on their tests over the past few months, the HTTPS signal showed “positive results” in terms of relevancy and ranking in Google’s search results.
What Next?
I’d highly recommend reading the full article over at Webmaster Central where Google provides further resources & information for moving websites over to HTTPS.