Google has been constantly moving towards HTTPS websites or may be the websites have started updating themselves to HTTPS but the move is very much evident from the fact that right now, as per MOZ, almost 40% of the search results are HTTPS. It’s difficult to tell if Google has actually prioritized the pages having HTTPS on the first page of the search results, or its because most of the big websites have finally started moving towards HTTPS.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP. HTTP is the protocol over which data exchange between the Server and your Browser happens. The ‘S’ at the end of HTTPS stands for ‘Secure’. This results in all the communications between your browser and your server being encrypted to avoid man in the middle attacks.
It is being rumored that Google is planning to place the pages with HTTPS higher in the search results, this seems evident from the search results, but there is nothing being said by the webmasters on the matter of improvements in the keywords after moving to HTTPs.
In March 2014, Google’s Matt Cutts gave an indication that HTTPS might add some value to the ranking signals. Matt’s tweet regarding the same is below:
This is big for eCommerce SEO because Google is said to be planning to prioritize only those eCommerce websites which have HTTPS implemented. You may use Qualys Lab Tool to check your website’s https status.
Below graph shows you how the SERP changes and HTTPS implementations happened.
Overall it does not seem that Google has actually adjusted much on the SERP side as per HTTPS, rather its more about adoption of HTTPS by the website owners.
