Transcript
Hi guys. And welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is, "Does HTPPS Security Certificates Help Your SEO Rankings"? This is an important conversation. I would say it's almost a little outdated, now. This is something that was a really big deal a couple of years ago, but I've never filmed a video about it. So I want to spend some time talking about it.
But before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today. We have a very special tea it's in a cake. These are called tea cakes. I'm going to do something different. I'm going to show it to you. I'm going to come through the camera. This is what it looks like. It's a teacake. It's a Pu'Er tea cake. It's very popular in Pu'Er Tea to have cakes. Don't ask me how it's made, but I just know that it adds a little bit different flavor to it because I actually had to use a knife to get the tea leaves out. So I have [inaudible 00:00:50] in this teapot right here, but let's go ahead and get brewing.
Now let's get talking about HTTPS. So HTTPS, if you don't know, is a security certificate that you can add on to your website. Google in the last couple of years has changed their systems where they actually prefer all websites to have HTTPS so that they can ensure that all of their users are secure when going and navigating the web. They want to make sure that for Google especially, that if they're going to recommend certain sites, that users can feel confident that the site that they're being sent to is a good site, a strong site, that they can trust their credit card information or whatever it might be, or their personal information. So HTTPS has become more and more important where a lot of people now ask, "Does this actually help my rankings?"
Now Google's stance on this has said that they have over 200 different ranking factors that influence their rankings, but one of them is security HTTPS. So their answer is yes, but marginally. And I would say, I would agree with that from what I've seen. HTTPS does help your rankings, but only marginally. But I think the best way to think about it is the opposite.
HTTPS will help you ratings marginally, but it will vastly hurt your rankings if you don't have it. I have a classic example. That's almost an extreme case of this, but it would prove the point. I worked with a client who had been ranking number one for all their top keywords for a very long time. And one weekend, their certificates expired, and that's normal. It took them one week to renew the certificate because it just wasn't top of mind for them, even though we constantly reminded them. After they renewed the certificate, their rankings dropped. They fell off the first page and it took us three to four months to get it back. It was stressful. The client was blaming us. It does not matter whose fault it was. All I know is it took me three to four months to get those rankings back. It was scary.
What I would say is the reason why it's important is because if your certificate expires or you don't have one, Google will have that scary warning. I forgot the exact wording. It's something to the effect of, "This site is not secure", and it will actually encourage you to go backwards, right? It makes it very difficult to navigate onto the page. Therefore, if you also have that warning pop up, it has also encourages visitors to not come on to your website. So to combine that, the rankings fell as well. So I would say HTTPS is not really about improving your rankings. It's to help shore up your rankings.
You do not want to have that message pop up on Google results and more and more sites, it will have that if you don't have security certificate. So in summary, this will be pretty short. It does help you ranking marginally, but that's not the way I would think about it. I would think about it just as a user experience. You don't want that "The site is not secure" to pop up. So you want to have this security certificate.
And especially if you've already been paying for one, you do not want to lose it. If you lose it, it will hurt your rankings. And even though it marginally helps your rankings, it can devastatingly hurt your rankings. So I don't want to be a fearmonger by any means, but this is my personal experience. And I've had many issues with it.
So if your certificate expires, yes, you can take one, two or three days to get it fixed, but try not to take longer than three days. I have seen sites collapsed because of that. So ensure that your security certificate is good, that it's refreshed, and that you it have on your site.
And then most importantly, it does marginally help your rankings, but more importantly, it can devastatingly hurt them. So hopefully that was helpful in understanding HTTPS. If you guys found that video valuable, please like and subscribe.
I'm going to go ahead and start pouring out my Pu'Er tea. This is brewed at 99 degrees Celsius so it is a very hot tea and the sun has just decided to come out. So I'm drinking hot tea with the hot weather, but you got to commit to the bit, right? I hope to see you guys again soon. See you, everybody.