News

From today onwards, Google Indexing  HTTPS pages over the HTTP version.

On Thursday, December 17, 2015,  Zineb Ait Bahajji, WTA, and the Google Security and Indexing teams, has announced that they index HTTPS pages over HTTP pages.

Google always gives top priority to the user security. For the past few years, it has upgraded their search algorithms to provide a more secure web experience for users. Google search, Gmail and YouTube are the result of such safe web connections. Earlier this year, Google has started  giving preference to HTTPS websites in its search results. They also stated that, the web crawler will begin looking for HTTPS versions of HTTP pages, even when they are not linked up from any pages.

Google has also explained on what basis it would choose, if there are two Urls from the same domain with same content, but provide on different protocol, then we’ll definitely choose to index the HTTPS Url if:

• It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies.
• It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page.
• It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt.
• It doesn’t have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page.
• It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP Urls.
• The server has a valid TLS certificate.
• It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag.
• The sitemaps lists the HTTPS Url, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the Url

Now, Google systems prefer the HTTPS version by default, so the website owner should start redirecting their your HTTP site to HTTPS version, by implementing the HSTS header on their server.

Mr. Zineb Ait Bahajji said, that they are very excited about discussing the revolutionary step of making the web more securely. He also stated that, by showing users HTTPS pages in our search results, we are believe that we are reducing the risk for users of browsing a website over an insecure connection and making them vulnerable to attacks.

In 2011, the Google has launched the  HTTPS encryption for its main search website. It brings the encrypted HTTPS connection to Gmail to provide more security to the users' emails on the Web. This big step in taking for providing the more secure connection on the web, and for maintaining the users' privacy.