Would adding an SSL certificate help my website?

[sthompson]

SSL certificates can obviously be a used as a ranking factor by Google, but would a site with no need for an SSL certificate notice a gain by adding one?

Is it possible to demonstrate you have an SSL certificate without having some https pages on your site?

[AWCthreads]

I've not heard of an SSL certificate being used as a ranking factor by Google. If that's true, I'd like to know more.

Your intent here is disingenuous. Secure socket layers are meant to provide users a layer of protection for whatever services they are using on the site.

Displaying a SSL seal without actually doing so is deceitful to users and should not be condoned.

If your site does not need an SSL, your SEO efforts should be focused elsewhere.

[donford]

I would be hard pressed to believe it would have a noticeable effect if any at all. A SSL does give credence that the site owners are actively trying to protect user information, but simply installing one for the sake of rankings seems like a waste.

A side note about sites that have ssl's.. generally a site with an ssl will use robots.txt to prevent certain pages from being crawled like the login or account info pages since these pages have no relevance to search engines. One could make an argument if you have such pages and allow bots to crawl them, in theory they could recognize that you're asking for information and not protecting it. Just a thought, but I do stand behind my original paragraph.

Hope that helps

[UnderRugSwept]

It all comes back to the rule of focusing your website around users, not search engines. If an SSL certificate is not required for your user experience, then don't use one. Otherwise you'd be doing exactly what Google doesn't want you to do: making a move for the sole purpose of gaining search engine rankings.

[Olaf_Pijl]

Google just stated that SSL does have a (small) beneficial effect on SEO. It's official! Don't expect too much of it, though. It's only one ranking factor out of 200+.