An announcement was made by Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji that, going forward, Google will try indexing HTTPS pages first before the HTTP equivalent page. Basically, what this means is that if your site’s internal navigation references the HTTP URLs, Google will attempt to see if the same pages will work on HTTPS. If they do work, then Google will index the HTTPS version of the age and show them 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.”
Here are the conditions that need to be met:
- 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.
Naturally, the first condition is a big one, as it would make sense that an HTTPS page doesn’t have any “insecure dependencies.
This is Google’s attempt at making the web a little bit more secure.