If you have a website and if you were using Google Search Consoles (Webmaster Tools), you might be wondering why Google indexed some of your web pages with HTTPS instead of HTTP. Google started to index HTTPS first if available since 2015
For better security, and better web experience, Google started indexing webpages with HTTPS first instead of HTTP. It means, even though you want to index HTTP pages when HTTPS is available, Google will prefer to crawl HTTPS than HTTP. Many of you might think HTTPS is slow. Yes. Because of encryption of data, your website will be slower, but it is secure, and Google will give ranking boost for HTTPS webpages. 😀 😀 😀
What is HTTPS ?
HTTPS (also called HTTP over TLS, HTTP over SSL, and HTTP Secure) is a protocol for secure communication over a computer network which is widely used on the Internet. HTTPS consists of communication over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) within a connection encrypted by Transport Layer Security or its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer. The main motivation for HTTPS is authentication of the visited website and protection of the privacy and integrity of the exchanged data.
Definition from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS
Google says when two URLs from the same domain appear to have the same content but are served over different protocol schemes, we’ll typically choose to index the HTTPS URL if:
- It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies.
- It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt.
- It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page.
- It doesn’t have a rel=”canonical” link to the HTTP page.
- It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag.
- It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs.
- The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL
- The server has a valid TLS certificate.
How to add HTTPS website in Google Search Console (Webmaster Tool) ?
To add HTTPS website, simply add a website with HTTPS after logging in to your Google Search Console. After verifying the website ownership, you will be able to control the website in Google Search Consoles.
Since Google decided to crawl HTTPS by default, you should consider to have HTTPS for your website in near future. 😀 😀 😀 We hope this information is helpful!
Thank you.