Late Night Internet Marketing with Mark Mason -- Affiliate Marketing Tips, Online Business Advice, Email Marketing and SEO
Switching To HTTPS: SEO Implications And How To [LNIM114]
Nov 17, 2016
Mark Mason - Entrepeneur and Online Business Coach
Switching to https can seem like an alphabet soup of acronyms and tech gibberish. This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, I talk about moving LateNightIM.com from the insecure http protocol to the secure https protocol that takes advantage of SSL. HTTP is the agreed upon was (protocol) that your web server uses to talk to web browsers. Add an “S” to the end, and you have a secure version of that protocol that uses SSL. SSL, or Secure Socket Layer, is one of the underlying encryption technologies that makes HTTPS possible.
I discuss the possible SEO advantages of the move and the way that I accomplished it using CloudFlare and a cool plugin called Really Simple SSL. Basically Google wants you to switch to HTTPS and they are apparently willing to give you a small search engine bump as an incentive,
In case you missed it, last week I discussed all about email marketing and the progress my buddy Cliff is making with ConvertKit. You can get the replay of
the webinar that I mentioned right here.
Next week I’m planning on publishing an episode on Thanksgiving Day. Stay tuned.
Show Notes
* Late Night Listener Feedback: What is the best approach in embedding a video in ConvertKit? Know what it is that you want to accomplish: sending traffic to your website, getting people in your mailing list or building a presence elsewhere? Your answer lies there.
* Internet Marketing News: Penguin 4.0, Google’s real-time algorithm, is now going to start paying attention to unnatural outbound links. If your website has a bunch of do-follow links, Google will start reducing the authority of that page or issue manual spam penalties. If your site has this, you need to stop and get rid of these links, or mark them as no-follow.
* Moving to a Secure Transport Protocol –you might notice that in websites such as Amazon, instead of the normal HTTP, their site will say HTTPS with a lock icon in it. Hypertext transfer protocol is the language that computers use to talk to each other and to transfer information from a web server to a web browser so the information can go reliably from point A to point B. In using an HTTPS, you are sending your information in code as it is sent using a secure version of HTTP called secure socket layer (SSL) so no one can eavesdrop on the information that you are sending. Google has deemed it appropriate to give better rankings to websites which uses HTTPS so explains why I decided to switch even if I do not handle financial information. It is a signal to Google that you care about being a trusted website and you are offering the best possible experience to your readers. You have two options in switching to HTTPS:
* If you are using a webhost, you will notice that they support this directly so you can follow their instructions.
* Use reverse proxies such as CloudFlare so you can automatically get access to a generic security certificate and the Really Simple SSL Plugin.
Don’t forget to change your site details in Google Webmaster Tools (now called Google Search Console) and in Google Analytics when switching to https.. I show the Google Analytics case below. In Google Search Console, you just add another site (with https instead of http). I'd keep them both in there.
Links Mentioned In This Episode
* Last's week's
Email Marketing webinar
*
Article about Penguin 4.0 from SearchEngineLand
* Article about
Outbound Link Penalties from SEL
* Wiki article on