In an effort to push security, Google announced they are starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal in their search results.Over the past few months Google has been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in their search ranking algorithms and the results have been positive.For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than one percent of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while webmasters are given time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, Google say they may decide to strengthen it because they’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.In the coming weeks, Google will publish detailed best practices to make TLS adoption easier, and to avoid common mistakes. Google have provided some basic tips to get started:

• decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
• use 2048-bit key certificates
• use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
• use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
• check out their Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
• don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
• allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

In their announcement Google note that security is a top priority for them. They note they invest a lot in making sure that their services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google.For more information and a few more links, see the Google blog announcement at:
googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal_6.html