HTTPS
2 articles with this tag
Does website security affect SEO? Vulnerabilities, hacked sites, HTTPS and rankings, sorted out from Google's official documentation
Google does not list vulnerabilities as a ranking factor. The damage comes when one is exploited. Hacked spam pages earn a 'This site may be hacked' label in results, malware or phishing triggers a 'Dangerous site' warning in Chrome (other browsers show their own Safe Browsing warnings), and sites that violate the spam policies may rank lower or not appear at all. HTTPS was announced in 2014 as a 'very lightweight' signal, and Google's current page experience documentation says that beyond Core Web Vitals, other page experience aspects don't directly help a site rank higher. This site's view: for SEO, spend your time on not getting hacked and on noticing quickly if you are, not on raising a security score.
What is Let's Encrypt — the free CA that automates HTTPS
Let's Encrypt = a free, automated TLS certificate authority (CA). The ACME protocol verifies domain control automatically, so issuance and renewal are hands-off. Certificates are short-lived (90 days) by design — to shrink the window of a key compromise and force automation. The biggest real-world incident isn't an attack but a renewal that broke without anyone noticing → cert expired → browser warning → users bounce. So monitor expiry. This site itself uses Let's Encrypt via Caddy's automatic TLS.