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Google To Begin To Index HTTPS Pages First, Before HTTP Pages When Possible

If your pages work on HTTPS, Google will likely show the HTTPS version over the HTTP version, starting today.

Barry Schwartz on December 17, 2015 at 11:26 am

Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji announced that going forward, Google will try to index HTTPS pages first, before the HTTP equivalent page. That means that if your site’s internal navigation references the HTTP URLs, Google will try to see if the same pages work on HTTPS. If they do, Google will index the HTTPS version and show those pages in the search results.

Google said, “Today we’d like to announce that we’re adjusting our indexing system to look for more HTTPS pages… Specifically, we’ll start crawling HTTPS equivalents of HTTP pages, even when the former are not linked to from any page… 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.”

The conditions include:

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 sitemap lists the HTTPS URL or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL.
The server has a valid TLS certificate.

The first condition is a big one, that the page doesn’t include “insecure dependencies.” Many pages include insecure images, includes, embeds, videos and so on.

This is all part of Google’s effort to make for a securer web.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.