Yesterday I came across an article from Tech Crunch about google heavily pressuring website owners to move from the http protocal to the more secure https. In the article they’re discussing about chrome in the article, not search, but I think it’s a reasonable assumption that a similar policy may be in place in search, if not now than in the near future. If two websites have comparable content, why not favor the one with the better user experience?

I admit as of late I’ve been a bit more reactive and not enough proactive than I’d like. Still, it seemed like good timing to make the change since I was already going through all this renaming pain. I recently opted to remove the ‘www’ subdomain from all my URLs which appears to have affected the google index for my websites. Just as the URL http://www.domain.com is technically different from http://domain.com, https://domain.com is technically different from http://domain.com. While it would have been better to have gone from http://www.domain.com to https://domain.com in one step, making the change would at mean any pain from renaming would at least overlap a little instead of costing me twice.

It would be nice to log into my blog over an https connection so I don’t have to fear a man in the middle attack any time I write a new blog post. I’m also considering eventually adding an ad-free datayze.com experience for a nominal fee which would necessitate a secure connection.

The final driver towards making the https plunge was the discoery that dreamhost offers and SSL certificate for free. Yesterday I added the Let’s Encrypt! certificate to sktyler.com. When that went off smoothly I went ahead and added one to datayze.com.

I have no idea if it’ll help my search rankings, but at least it couldn’t hurt. Probably.