Another homework assignment for webmasters given by Ms. Google

Google announced that it will start to favor websites that encrypt their traffic in their search results.

Google said:

For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal—affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content—while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

Read Write did an article on the topic:

Google on Thursday applied its not-inconsiderable leverage as Search King of the Universe to “encourage” websites to encrypt their traffic, thus protecting themselves and their users from hackers and other spies (hello, NSA!)

What Google announced, specifically, is that it will begin favoring sites that encrypt their traffic in its search results. As offers go, this seems eminently reasonable and optional. Adopting Web encryption—technically, the HTTPS standard, also known as HTTP over TLS—is pretty straightforward; lots of sites (banks, many email services, Facebook, etc.) use it already. (ReadWrite, alas, does not.)

(A technical aside: HTTPS only protects the security of messages as they transit the Internet. It has nothing to do with whether data stored on cloud servers is locked up against snoops).

Read the full article here