google-security-360In the past, several Google employees have suggested they would like to see site security included as a ranking factor within their search engine. Now, Google has followed through and announced that going HTTPS, or adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site, can potentially give you a small ranking boost.

Don’t expect to propel yourself to the top of the search results by adding HTTPS, as Google refers to it as “a very lightweight signal” within the larger scheme of things and only affects “fewer than 1% of global queries.” However, it was also implied that the new ranking signal may get beefed up in the future in an attempt to encourage all site owners to increase the security on their sites.

The change should come as little surprise to anyone who heard Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, publicly endorse the idea of making SSL a ranking factor just a few months ago.

Unlike many ranking changes that Google makes, the risk of drawbacks is small. Google has been saying that switching to HTTPS should not have an effect on SEO for years, so long as you take a few steps to guarantee your traffic stays steady. Mostly, such steps relate to communicating to Google so it understands how to read your site.

Google has also said they will be releasing for information and resources for webmasters deciding to adopt HTTPS, but for now all they offer are these tips:

  • Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
  • Use 2048-bit key certificates
  • Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
  • Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
  • Check out our site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
  • Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
  • Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

It has been a few weeks since Google caught the search world by surprise with the release of its local search algorithm which has been nicknamed “Pigeon.” Out of all of Google’s search algorithms, Pigeon was likely the most well-received at its initial roll-out, but is that still the same now that some time has passed?

PigeonWhile we at TMO still feel that Pigeon has the potential to help local businesses and searchers improve their local results, it is always good to get the opinions from other experts in the search marketing community. Thankfully, Search Engine Land did just that. They compiled the opinions of several authority figures in search marketing, and needless to say the consensus is mixed.

Much of the criticism is related to buggy issues likely to be resolved in the near future, but there is also plenty worthy of discussing and lots of room for improvement. You can find out exactly what the experts had to say here.

Bing is working hard to improve user safety. But rather than censoring or blocking sites that Bing deems to be a threat, the search engine is offering extra information so that users can make informed decisions and hopefully avoid sites that may have been compromised.

Bing announced the Bing Site Safety Page this week on the Bing Webmaster Blog. The safety page will show up on search results if Bing has identified a specific site as having a potential safety issue. This means users will receive a warning that a site might have problems and the webmasters will have added incentive to resolve the issues quickly.

Below you can see a screen shot of what the alert will look like and what the full Bing Site Safety Page looks like.

Bing Safety

The Bing Site Safety Page will include information such as how long the issue has existed and when the last scan took place. Webmasters will also have extended information about how to resolve the security issue within Bing Webmaster Tools.

The Bing Safety Page offers:

  • The reason the page is being marked as malicious, e.g. Malicious Javascript, DriveBy Attacks, Malware Network References, etc…
  • The date the infection was first detected
  • How often the URL has been scanned
  • The date the infection was most recently detected

Bing also said they planned on expanding the page further in the near future with more data such as:

  • The total number of URLs detected as malicious on the site
  • The types of malware found
  • The last date of suspicious activity
  • When the site was last scanned
  • Warning trigger rate/ coverage