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Google here officially announced that using SSL is minor ranking factor. On that page is, besides other rules, stated to Use 2048-bit key certificates.

Does it mean that using 224-bit key ECC certificate will not have positive impact on SERP ranking because the key is not "long enough" ? It seems that ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) certificates have some nice benefits (e.g. less server CPU usage and less bandwidth used, etc..).

I would like to use ECC certificates, but I fear it will not help me with Google. Or maybe I am too concerned and Google accepts any trusted SSL certificate and doesn't care about key size at all ?

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  • Using a certificate effects one small set of metrics within the list of about 50 trust metrics. It will boost any sites trust score. Just make sure you use a high quality reputable certificate issuer that vets it's clients. Getting a certificate from a loosie goosie certificate issuer will do you nothing and can possibly down-grade your trust score. This is one case where cheap is not good. But moderately priced can be okay.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jun 5, 2015 at 19:56
  • @closetnoc Thanks for comment, could you please write some examples what are those less trusted and what are generally "safe" certificates ? I am thinking about purchasing RapidSSL or Comodo, what about these ?
    – Frodik
    Commented Jun 6, 2015 at 3:41
  • I used to be a webhost and a certificate issuer way back in the day, but since I closed it all down a decade ago, I have not kept up with who is good or not. I semi-retired and now do back-end security research while farming, antique sales, and so on. Along the way, I did specialized search projects, data mining, and weird data stuff. It would be interesting to know who is good these days. Not knowing, I would resort to GoDaddy who I used as a host (and still do)- post Network Solutions- without any troubles.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jun 6, 2015 at 3:49
  • I think you'll be pretty safe with Let's Encrypt certificates and they are free. Google are sponsors for them so they obviously think they are a trustworthy source of SSL certificates and best of all installing a new SSL certificate takes less than 30 seconds.
    – Cromulent
    Commented Mar 7, 2016 at 10:51

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It will help you with google. They like SSL certificates. Google has been telling webmasters it is safe to do so for years. But you need to take the proper steps to ensure your traffic doesn’t suffer. That means make sure to communicate to Google that you moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS.

But you need to make sure that you follow this directives.

  • Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
  • Use 2048-bit key certificates
  • Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
  • Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
  • Check out our site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
  • Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
  • Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
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