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HTTPS as a ranking signal

googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com

41–50 of 212 posts

Re: HTTPS as a ranking signal

#41
This is great, it's just a fact that ssl will not have major adoption unless there's a clear UI or business reason for it.

I hope google takes it one step further and updates chrome to show an insecure warning when it detects a password field on the page and it is sent plain over http.

Re: HTTPS as a ranking signal

#42
post #28

This is great, but it should also be a reminder that SSL is currently not possible for custom domains hosted on GitHub: https://konklone.com/post/github-pages-now-supports-https-so... . I hope a solution materializes eventually.

Now you can contact Github with this announcement and voice your concerns. Now they have more incentive to change it (if people actively voice their issues to Github).

I don't have the best experience with submitting feedback to GitHub and getting good responses, so hopefully someone like @konklone can make that case to them - again.

Re: HTTPS as a ranking signal

#43
Considering the importance of HTTPS to, in Google's words, "[making the] Internet safer more broadly", this seems like a good time to again suggest that Google enable HTTPS for Google Analytics by default[1].

Google Analytics is on 50.8% of the top million domains on the Internet, and on 26.96% of a randomly selected 48.5 million domains[1]. Of the 42 billion links analyzed in my research, over 48% of them had Google Analytics on either the start or the end. That's a lot of information leakage.

Anyone who is eavesdropping on HTTP connections to the Google Analytics endpoints can observe a web user's traffic history trivially. This enables simple mass surveillance by specifically looking for these connections and recording them. HTTPS would prevent that.

I should note, whilst there is an option to specifically force SSL in the new Google Analytics[2], it must be enabled by default in order to have a positive impact. We can't rely on the owners of millions of domains to upgrade to ensure an end user's privacy.

[1]: http://smerity.com/articles/2013/google_analytics_and_nsa.ht...

[2]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Re: HTTPS as a ranking signal

#44

I'm sorry, but this simply isn't something a search engine should be dictating. Turning enabling SSL into some arms race that panics small businesses into buying millions of new, pointless certificates just isn't very fair. This kind of policy needs to be discussed openly in a suitable forum, e.g. the IETF, not handed down to us by a single company who think they have a right to dictate how the Internet works - and h…

[deleted]

Re: HTTPS as a ranking signal

#45
I'm surprised by the amount of negative comments. Independently of what do you think about HTTPS and CAs in general. Given there the alternative currently is plain text, I'm actually surprised that it wasn't a signal before.

Re: HTTPS as a ranking signal

#46
upside: security, further migration to HTTP/2 easier (when it's ready)

downside: HTTPS negotiation time overhead (slower website) (as long as we use HTTP 1.1), costs (certificate, technical migration)

all in all i think it's a great move by google, thx

Re: HTTPS as a ranking signal

#47

I'm sorry, but this simply isn't something a search engine should be dictating. Turning enabling SSL into some arms race that panics small businesses into buying millions of new, pointless certificates just isn't very fair. This kind of policy needs to be discussed openly in a suitable forum, e.g. the IETF, not handed down to us by a single company who think they have a right to dictate how the Internet works - and h…

I think your description of the situation is rather overblown. Having HTTPS support will only get you a very minor boost in rankings.

Additionally, discussing things in a forum usually doesn't get things moving. It's coming out with actual advancements like the original Chrome beta with V8 that drives innovation.

I think that the solution to harmful dictatorship should be good alternatives, not more laws to shackle progress to humongous councils.

Re: HTTPS as a ranking signal

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about "always". I run a site that provides counter information for League of Legends ( http://www.championcounter.com/ ) and I doubt very much my users will benefit at all from me moving over to HTTPS.

A lot of work routers might flag that site url as "GAMING" and with too much use could potentially contribute to someone losing their job. Also some isps have been caught injecting ads into plain text web sites [1]. Do you want more ads on your site that you didn't put there? [1] http://zmhenkel.blogspot.com/2013/03/isp-advertisement-injec...

Switching over to HTTPS in and of itself shouldn't stop much data leakage given that the hostname - at least at current - isn't difficult to obtain (and really gives the game away for the content you're visiting as far as my site is concerned), but I suppose it's a step in the right direction and will stop primitive tracking attempts.

Protecting against code injection is actually a fair point though.

Re: HTTPS as a ranking signal

#50

I'm sorry, but this simply isn't something a search engine should be dictating. Turning enabling SSL into some arms race that panics small businesses into buying millions of new, pointless certificates just isn't very fair. This kind of policy needs to be discussed openly in a suitable forum, e.g. the IETF, not handed down to us by a single company who think they have a right to dictate how the Internet works - and h…

This kind of policy needs to be discussed openly in a suitable forum, e.g. the IETF, not handed down to us by a single company who think they have a right to dictate how the Internet works

I don't see how is this any different from any other signal that Google uses to prioritize sites. Forcing small businesses to buy certificates doesn't seem any different than forcing them to have faster websites, for example.

There's an argument for more diversity in search engines, but I don't see how is that specific to this signal.

There are strong arguments for not enabling privacy by default - not least since it prevents any kind of decentralization or caching of content.

How does it prevent decentralization?

At a time when OpenSSL just suffered one of its worst bugs in history, forcing small sites to assume the risk of running code like this, which they inevitably will get wrong, materially worsens security for all, it doesn't improve it.

How many people could exploit Heartbleed before it was publicly announced compared to how could sniff traffic on open networks, as countless tutorials explain how to do?

Heartbleed was bad, and OpenSSL is a mess, but let's pretend that unencrypted logins are somehow less bad.

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