HTTPS is a security-enhanced version of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the application protocol through which all data communication on the web happens. HTTP helps web users retrieve web pages. HTTPS, or HTTP Secure, does the same but in a more secure manner. HTTPS functions so that unauthorized users cannot access information they are not supposed to have by emphasizing secure search. Google announced it's new HTTPS update in December, 2019. 

Find everything you need to know about the HTTPS update here.

What is HTTPS?

• HTTP: HyperText Transfer Protocol
• HTTPS: HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure

What is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS?

Both HTTP and HTTPS help web users transfer and receive information over the Internet. So, what is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS?

HTTPS with its secure information transfer, however, is particularly important for sites where sensitive information is sent, such as ecommerce sites where users submit payment information like billing addresses, phone numbers and credit card data. HTTPS works with the protocol known as Transport Layer Security (TLS), or previously Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), to encrypt sensitive data, prevent the alteration or corruption of data during transfer, and authenticate certain users to communicate with the website.

Essentially, HTTPS provides security by generating short-term session keys, or encryption codes, for the data transfers between a user and the website server. These security keys must be certified by a certificate authority such as Comodo or Symantec.

The original use for HTTPS was for ecommerce transactions, email, and other sensitive data transfers. Today it has become the standard for all websites, endorsed by Google itself and now a requirement for many advanced features like progressive web applications.

Why is HTTPS important?

Any site that deals with secure information should definitely be using HTTPS. Even sites that do not deal specifically with sensitive data, however, can still benefit from HTTPS.

Google itself has been one of the biggest advocates in secure search of the universal applicability of HTTPS. Speaking at BrightEdge's Share16, Thao Tran, Global Product Partnerships at Google, stated that HTTPS, "and making sure your site is secure is an imperative... The future of the web is a secure one, so make sure people in your organization understand HTTPS, and it should be on the roadmap."

The endorsement from Google and the consensus from SEO authorities that you should migrate your site to HTTPS now, if you haven't already, isn't just another SEO flavor-of-the-month novelty. The security risks associated with HTTP are real and have potentially severe consequences, especially if you are in ecommerce, finance, deliver some kind of SaaS solution, or have any other business model that involves handling sensitive customer data over the internet. Most notably, HTTP has the potential for an internet service provider -- or another outsider actor -- to actually tamper with pages that your site visitors navigate to, including changing content or removing elements from the page. In the case of ISPs this is sometimes used to insert advertisements or behavioral tracking cookies for advertisements, but can be put to far more nefarious uses in the hands of other parties.

Which is safer, HTTP or HTTPS?

In short, HTTPS is safer. A 1999 memo from the World Wide Web Consortium, an international web community run by Jeffrey Jaffe and Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, documented a number of different security considerations and potential attack vectors associated with HTTP/1.1:

1. Leakage of personal information: Ideally sites should provide an interface that allows users to control the level of disclosure on the personal information they enter on the site, but this isn't always the case and leaves end users dependent on the design whims of the webmaster
2. Abuse of server log information: Web servers log the navigational behavior of site visitors. This information could potentially be used to glean private information about end users
3. Unsecure transfer of sensitive information: HTTP has no ability to regulate the actual content of data being transferred over it
4. Encoding of sensitive information in URIs: The source of a link could potentially be private information or inadvertently disclosure a private source of information
5. Privacy issues associated with accept request-headers: Another class of data that has the potential to be used to triangulate against other data sources to identify end users. This loss of privacy can be secure on server side, but again places the end user's information at mercy of the webmaster
6. Attacks based on file and path names: In an insecure system a bad actor can take the URL of a piece of content they have access to, e.g. "site.com/resource/profile/jon-profile.docx", and navigate up the taxonomy to get access to the /profile/ directory when they're technically not supposed to have access
7. DNS spoofing: HTTP relies heavily on Domain Name Service, which associates domain names, e.g. brightedge.com, with underlying IP addresses. Bad actors can deliberately misassociate an IP address-DNS pairing to "spoof" a DNS, thereby diverting users from the site they meant to navigate to a completely different one
8. Location headers and spoofing: Similar to the DNS spoofing issue, a server hosting several organizations who aren't associated with each other must check the values of Location and Content-Location headers to ensure that those organizations aren't attempting to invalidate resources they don't own
9. Authentication credentials and idle web clients: HTTP/1.1 doesn't have a method for clients to discard cached authentication credentials
10. HTTP proxies and caching ("man-in-the-middle" attacks)
11. Denial of Service attacks on proxies (DDOS)

Read our take on why HTTPS is essential for any brand that wants a real presence online.

What are the benefits of HTTPS?

Google announced in 2014 that they were going to be considering HTTPS a light ranking factor in an effort to encourage security on the web (check out the post on HTTPS vs HTTP and SEO). Even outside of Google’s recommendations, sites that make the switch to HTTPS often find that customers regard their site as more authentic. The site is also more protected from damages that can occur from third parties. More recently, Google warned Chrome users that the web browser will begin redflagging sites that are still on HTTP: “Beginning in October 2017, Chrome will show the ‘Not secure’ warning in two additional situations: when users enter data on an HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode.”

This message now appears in URL bar of Chrome browsers:

It is important to note that the SEO benefits from switching to HTTPS do seem minimal currently, the risks involved in not migrating are huge. Not only are site visitors deprived of a large amount of security -- poor security is about as bad as UX can get -- but Google has stated that Chrome now displays "Not Secure" next to a site's URL in the browser window when users try to fill out a form. 

How to switch from HTTP to HTTPS?

Switch from HTTP to HTTPS in 7 steps:

1. You will need to first determine if you need a single, multi-domain or wildcard certificate
2. Next, you will need to use a 2048-bit key certificates so that you can get a Certificate Signing Request on your webserver
3. You will have to make sure you maintain a current SSL certificate
4. For the resources that are on the same secure domain, use relative URLs
5. Use server-side 301 HTTP redirects -- mod_rewrite is common -- for redirects to the HTTPS pages
6. Make sure your robots.txt allows the web crawlers access to your HTTPS pages
7. Verify that your website returns the same HTTP status code

You can also get our detailed guide to HTTPS site migrations, which lists out migration tasks for both SEOs and digital marketers as well as web developers.

HTTPS vs HTTP is a question that has plagued many site owners as they try to remain compliant with Google and provide a secure space for their visitors. Those interested in making the switch should review the above steps adopted from Google’s suggestions and see how it might impact them.

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What is knowledge-based trust?

Knowledge-based trust is the idea that an algorithm can establish the level of trust a website deserves based on its accuracy. In February 2015 Google published an academic paper that proposed using trust as a means of ranking websites and determining the ones that were most likely to provide users with the best answer.

What did Google discuss in the paper?

Google had its engineers crawl millions of web pages to pull out 2.8 billion trusted facts. These facts were then compared to the data that was contained on 119 million web pages. They used these facts to determine how much these websites could be trusted. When the engineers then went back and manually checked some of the results, they found that the algorithm was accurate at ranking the trustworthiness.

What could knowledge-based trust mean for the future of SEO?

Since this is not yet being used as a ranking factor, it is difficult to know exactly how it will impact websites, but the implications could be huge. For example, it can be used to help establish domain authority and determine the credibility of certain sites. Google already has a few sites, such as The New York Times that are maintained as trusted websites. This factor would allow Google to employ this type of list to millions of websites, which can then impact the rankings of countless sites.

It is possible that these developments would encourage the rise of niche sites that specialize in particular types of content. It could also potentially lead to certain types of sites self-censoring, such as medical journals becoming more reluctant to publish controversial research.

The implications of knowledge-based trust as a ranking factor would be far reaching and impact most websites. Google has indicated an interest in the subject, however, which means that brands need to be ready. Fact checking your publications and creating trustworthy articles should be a priority for everyone, even if the update has not yet been added to the algorithm.

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Rich snippets are a type of structured data markup that allows search engines to better understand what information is contained on each web page. Rich answers were first displayed by Google back in 2009. Our research at BrightEdge has shown that the rich answers, such as video thumbnails, can increase the click-through rate by as much as 50 percent in certain SERP positions.

What is the Google rich snippet tool?

As of 2016, Google supports the following types of snippets:

• information about a product, such as its price, reviews and availability
• recipes that can are compatible with web searches and Recipe View
• reviews of items or businesses, such as a store
• events that people might attend at a particular time and place
• information about a software application, such as price and reviews
• a video thumbnail for online videos
• news article headlines, images and publisher information

For example, for a news article, you might see a snippet that looks like this:

For a video rich answer, you may see:

Do rich snippets help SEO?

The regulations that dictate which rich snippets are displayed for which sites are regularly changing. For example, Google experimented with author rich answers for a few years before eliminating them in 2014.

Video snippets were once much more widely used, but in 2014, many brands saw them disappear. While there is a lot of conjecture about why this happened, highly reputable video sites, like YouTube, will still have them appear.

Given the number of changes that have happened with rich answers in the past, it is likely that there will be more changes in the future. For this reason, you should focus on preparing all your content for potential rich answers.

To optimize your content for potential snippets, you should use schema.org markup. This has been designed to provide a common system for Google, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo! Use all of the markup data that applies to your site and optimize both your existing content and new content that you create.

The schema markup will allow you to fill in numerous pieces of data about your content. For example, if you are doing a schema markup for an event, you can fill in information such as:

• the aggregate rating
• the person or organization attending
• the time the event will begin
• the event duration
• the end date and time
• the place or postal address
• the organizer
• the performer

Getting rich snippets to appear with your search results can help increase click-through rates and boost visibility. Using schema markup can help you maximize your chances for displaying a snippet.

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What is search volume?

Search volume is a metric that shows how many people are searching for a particular query. When creating your content strategy, taking search volume into account is vital because it reflects the popularity of the query. Ideally, you want to find keywords with a high search volume and a low rate of search competition. However, finding long-tail keywords that appeal to your target audience with low competition can also be an effective strategy.

Why is monitoring search volume important?

Looking at your search volume can provide you with important insight about the popularity of certain keywords and how it fluctuates throughout the year. Exact match data will tell you precisely how many searches were run each month of the year. Rolling average data, on the other hand, will account for all of the volume for all the searches throughout the year and find you the average. This can be helpful if you are working with highly seasonal keywords, such as "Super Bowl" or "Halloween Costumes." If you only used the exact match and started to do research in May, it might be a challenge to ascertain the true value of the keyword.

How do you use search volume data?

1. Armed with the data gained from search volume research, you can target optimal keywords throughout the year. Since you will know the value of particular keywords and how their usage fluctuates throughout the year, you will be able to identify optimal opportunities to target them.
2. You will be able to understand historical trends and make future projections. As you compile historical search volume for particular keywords, you will be able to see if drops indicate a loss of value for the keyword or if it is a part of regular, yearly cycle. This will help you make future projections about the keyword’s performance and inform your decisions about the best keywords to use in your content.

Using search volume can help you begin to compile the keywords that you will use to build a successful website. Understand the difference between the exact match data and the rolling average data and use them as needed to better understand a keyword’s performance.

Related Materials

• Boost your organic traffic with Quick Answers
• Create content that measurably performs

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