In 2014, as part of its interest in and promotion of secure online experiences, Google had called for “HTTPS Everywhere.” Since then, HTTPS has become one of approximately 200 Google ranking factors in its algorithm.
HTTPS (or HTTP over Transport Layer Security (TLS)) means a site uses a secure socket layer (SSL) encryption to send/receive data and improve the security of that website.
You may have noticed, when shopping online or submitting sensitive or login information, that a website URL switches from “HTTP” to “HTTPS” indicating the page utilizes SSL (If it doesn’t, don’t submit your information). What Google wants is for all pages of a site to utilize the same security that an e-commerce or login page does.
Do you need to implement HTTPS Everywhere? Not necessarily.
Google has stated that this ranking signal is “lightweight” or not contributing as significantly to your search ranking as other “signals.”
Additionally, Bing does not index HTTPS sites the same way as Google which could cause a drop in organic results. Bing also allows users to search using either HTTP://bing.com or HTTPS://bing.com. If a user arrives at your HTTPS-enabled site via Bing’s HTTP search URL, the referring data is not passed, which can affect your website analytics accuracy/data.
