Raza Zaidi VP Product

•  Gigaom.com is built on Wordpress …which claims to be “SEO friendly out-of-the-box”

•  Gigaom.com is hosted on Auttomatic’s Wordoress VIP service

•  We get lazy in terms of SEO

Background

Panda 4.0 Release on or about 5/19

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal_6.html

“making sure that websites people access from Google are secure” “we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web” “we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.”

HTTPS as a ranking signal

Many “how-tos” available on where to buy cheap certs (EV preferably if you can

afford) and how to install

•  Wordpress VIP’s implementation of https uses Server Name Indication (SNI)

•  Not supported on XP and old versions of IE •  Warnings will be presented to user resulting in lost traffic

•  Also can supports HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) •  This degrades gracefully so no traffic loss

•  Using Wordpress plugin to forward all http traffic (eg. from bookmarks, old links, etc.) to https

•  https://github.com/Automattic/vip-quickstart/issues/275

Wordpress VIP

Pay special attention to 3rd Party embeds (& ads!)

Difficult for a media site with 100K+ post pages

•  Historical users will have subscribed to the http version

•  The feeds will be broken; users will need to manually re-subscribe to the feeds

•  Place FAQs prominently on site

RSS Readers

HTTPS Effects (so far) – Google Search Referrals

Post Panda/Pre HTTPS

Sep t8 – HTTPS live on gigaom.com

Post HTTPS