This important tech-related blog post is brought to you by NetTrack Marketing, our digital marketing vendor partner.
July is shaping up to be a milestone month for website owners and webmasters alike. All 1‑800‑SWEEPER partners should take note – effective July 2018, Google’s Chrome browser will begin explicitly marking all non-HTTPS websites as ‘Not secure.’
If you go to your website, and “https://” is not showing in your browser’s address bar, this change will (negatively!) impact your site.
Indications of an HTTPS secure website – note the green “secure” messaging and the website address beginning with “https://” – if you don’t see these indicators on your own website, this change is going to negatively impact your business!
Beginning with Google Chrome’s next version update in July, the new ‘Not secure’ warning/messaging for websites that are not utilizing HTTPS will look like this in a user’s browser:
Google Chrome identifies HTTP-only website as ‘Not secure’
As you can see, not properly updating your website for this critical change has the potential to seriously hurt your online presence.
Google has been encouraging webmasters of non-secure websites to make the change to secure HTTPS for years now – including hinting at a small rankings boost to further incentivize the shift. The campaign has proved successful. According to a recent Google blog post:
- Over 68{cd9db56748df391b131010c0c880113f42d56e29626b6ebf74877cbc020d5b1a} of Chrome traffic on both Android and Windows is now protected
While it is critical that you update your website to avoid having your website visitors see any of these increased security warnings, technical issues can arise if it is not done properly.
Some common problems with HTTPS migrations include:
- Mixed content warnings due to an incomplete HTTPS conversion
- Content duplication issues, with both HTTPS and HTTP versions of the pages getting crawled and indexed by search engines
- Failure to properly redirect the previous HTTP version of the website to the new HTTPS version
Most search engine indexing or ranking problems resulting after an HTTPS migration are the result of improperly implemented redirects. A proper HTTP to HTTPS migration will not result in any negative search ranking or indexing issues. In fact, updating to an all HTTPS website has the potential to increase your rankings!
If you have questions about how your site is being seen by users after the update, feel free to call Brian Kall at NetTrack Marketing (216-321-8894 x 107).
