If you've been a website owner for long, you know that Google loves changing things up (some might call it \u201cpulling the rug out from under you\u201d).<\/p>\n
Take for instance how Google decided to yank the Google Authorship photo from their search results<\/a>. Many (including yours truly) spent significant time and energy making sure our Google Authorship was in place<\/a> \u2026 and now those pictures are gone. The time wasn't fully wasted as they still see authorship as important, but it's certainly not as beneficial in the short term as many people were hoping for.<\/p>\n Well last week Google did it again. They announced that SSL is now a ranking factor for websites. What does that mean exactly? Well, if your site is served up as 100% HTTPS then you will get a bit of a ranking priority. Google calls this priority a \u201cvery lightweight [ranking] signal,\u201d but it's one that \u201cover time, [they] may decide to strengthen.\u201d This means that there are a lot of SEO strategies such as producing high quality content that are still more important for rankings.<\/span><\/p>\n While this news might be\u00a0a bit exhausting (because now you\u00a0have to jump through all the hoops again and convert your sites to HTTPS), I think this is generally a positive change and one that Google is unlikely to back off on later.<\/p>\n Now as for membership site owners, I think this change is definitely going to be much more important for your members\u00a0and a bit easier to implement than for the vast majority of sites on the web.<\/p>\n If you've been processing credit cards on your site using a WordPress membership plugin like MemberPress, then chances are you already have an SSL certificate and are running at least part of your site over HTTPS. So really, all you'd need to do is to ensure all of your pages & posts are fully encrypted and the http versions of pages are being redirected to their https counterparts. You can do this by modifying references on your site so that any images, javascript, and\u00a0css files so that they're being loaded over HTTPS. If you have a large number of pages this can take time so migrating isn't something you should embark on frivolously and can cause problems if you don't get all of the references.<\/p>\n WordPress membership sites should not only be running their\u00a0payment pages over SSL but also their\u00a0members-only\u00a0protected areas. Many membership sites protect premium content that you wouldn't want\u00a0accessed publicly and in addition to that, many membership sites contain protected areas where private user information is recorded. Having the extra security of HTTPS will give your users more confidence that their information is safe.<\/p>\n Really though, I think this could be\u00a0a modest\u00a0opportunity for you membership site owners to help\u00a0your rankings. Even though it's a very small ranking signal now, it's still a ranking signal, and one that is very straight forward to implement. Although it can be some work\u00a0to get SSL working effectively (and certainly not the most important ranking strategy), unlike many other ranking strategies that are ambiguous, this could be some low hanging fruit to be harvested.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019ve been a website owner for long, you know that Google loves changing things up (some might call it \u201cpulling the rug out from under you\u201d). Take for instance how Google decided to yank the Google Authorship photo from their search results. Many (including yours truly) spent significant time and energy making sure our [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15226,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_strive_editorial_status":"not-started","_strive_copy_of":0,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"content-sidebar","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_strive_checklists":"\"\"","_strive_active_checklist":"62291e2bb2422","_strive_post_notes":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[69,19],"tags":[79,184,26,70,80,182,183],"class_list":{"0":"post-4277","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-advice","8":"category-news","9":"tag-google","10":"tag-https","11":"tag-membership","12":"tag-membership-site","13":"tag-rankings","14":"tag-seo","15":"tag-ssl","16":"entry"},"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t