Google Now Favours Websites Using SSL

TransAmDan

Forum Admin
Staff member
SSL-padlock.jpgIn my journey to keep this website popular and to gain more visitors. I am always looking ways to improve. Adding on add ons to the forum like the 'Classifieds' for sale section. Trying to make the website perform as fast as possible but popping it on a dedicated server. Many things affect how google rank the website, content and website speed play a bit part.

When Google announced it will start favouring websites that use SSL, it came as quite a surprise. Google is usually secretive and quiet about how it ranks websites, but it clearly wants more websites to start using SSL, even if it is technically unnecessary. So this started me to looking at SSL for the Renegades website. This article give you a bit more info on Google and SSL:- Google Now Favours Websites Using SSL

SSL is basically encrypted pages, websites like your bank use it. For a website like ours it's not technically required but if it helps rankings I'm willing to give anything a try.

So last Sunday I started the application for an SSL certificate (this is needed to enable SSL) this was ready after a few days. To get the website to perform the SSL I had to then get a dedicated IP address, which was this thread, http://www.solent-renegades.co.uk/recent-changes/16807-dedicated-ip-address-2.html#post43632 there was a small hickup with the DNS update, but eventually all locked in.

So soon you will be able to visit out website on https://www.solent-renegades.co.uk/forum.php and you will have a little padlock in your browser like when you visit the bank's website. At the moment there are still some items on the page that are no encrypted so visiting the https:// site will probably throw a warning up in your browser. I basically need to look at all the parts of the pages that are called up, and make sure they are served from the https:// url. This also applies to anything that is served from the CDN (content delivery network) this also has to be served from SSL. The CDN does have an SSL version, which I have also enabled.

Its coming together, may get time to tinker with the remaining small parts at the weekend, and get this fully up and running ready for Google to crawl the pages in hope to rank higher.
 
I will follow that one closely. As a hater of all things Google due to privacy issues, it will be interesting to see where they take it.
But i will be curious to see what implementation of SSL for the gades website does to my zero cookie use policy on my works laptop!
 
I will follow that one closely. As a hater of all things Google due to privacy issues, it will be interesting to see where they take it.
But i will be curious to see what implementation of SSL for the gades website does to my zero cookie use policy on my works laptop!

It should be fine, it currently uses cookies at the moment for login. That part of it wont change. The data from the web server is encrypted and then decrypted by your web browser.

And on that note: Apple May Be Working On Its Own Search Engine
That will be an interesting one. Hopefully our website will be in the running to be included in the searches :)
 
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Still not got round to fully implement this yet, I was going to do it at the weekend, but got stuck into the car instead.

When I get round to it, I will try it on the article section first before moving to the forum. As if you insert an image into a post from another web which isn't SSL enabled, then your browser will flag up and issue that not all elements on the page are encrypted. With CMS (Article section) images are treated different. anyway a lot of things to tweak before getting to that stage. :)
 
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