Google to Start Indexing HTTPS Pages Over HTTP Pages Whenever Possible
Google is trying hard to make web a securer place. Keeping that goal in mind, they have made adjustment towards it.
First of all, let’s start with Google’s latest announcement. Then we will explain what it means.
“Today we would like to announce that we are adjusting our indexing system to look for more HTTPS pages. Specifically, we will start crawling HTTPS equivalent 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 will typically choose to index the HTTPS URL.”
In summary, Google will now look for HTTPS pages to index whenever possible. So, if you have two equivalent pages with different schemes, Google will prioritise the HTTPS page and index it over the HTTP version.
Having said that there are some conditions — eight, to be precise — that will have to be fulfilled for that. In other words, Google will choose to index the HTTPS version as long as:
- It does not contain insecure dependencies
- It is not blocked from crawling by robots.txt
- It does not redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page
- It does not have a rel=”canonical” link to the HTTP page
- It does not contain a noindex robots meta tag.
- It does not have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs.
- The sitemap lists the HTTPS URL or does not list the HTTP version of the URL.
- The server has a valid TLS certificate.
Google also advises website owners to move the HTTP URLs to HTTPS. All this is as an effort the make the web a more secure place to browse.
