Getting the best possible performance out of your website is a difficult task to take on. There are so many things to do right and if you do them wrong, you will get no benefit at all. Google are not always clear about what factors affect the SEO performance of your website. One question that comes up a lot is “will SSL boost SEO for my website?” The short and simple answer to this is yes!
SSL is short for Secure Socket Layer and is a very simple way for you to add a layer of security to your website. Google have confirmed that they are going to start using this as a ranking factor for their search results. You can tell a site is using SSL when the URL bar for the website has a green padlock next to the URL. It is possible to have a site using SSL that does not get this padlock. If you do not have the padlock, then you will not get any SEO boost.
It is not currently known how much of a bonus google are going to give to sites that use SSL, but they have publicly confirmed that they do consider it. Over the next few years this will likely become a stronger factor for sites to use SSL to boost SEO.
Warning When Using SSL To Boost SEO
If you are using an adsense website your income is going to get hit pretty hard. Its currently a catch 22. Not all ad publishers are using https. This means that if your website is using HTTPS, you will not be able to display any of the ads that are not HTTPS. It would seem that quite a lot of these ads are not using HTTPS, which means using SSL to Boost SEO, is a good way to boost your SEO, but it will hurt your adsense income.