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Home / SEO / SSL is a Ranking Factor, and So Are My Balls

SSL is a Ranking Factor, and So Are My Balls

Written by Jacob King // Last Updated August 7, 2014 76 Comments

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Golf clap Google, you guys really know how to get them SEOs dancing around. Well you’re not fooling this guy, nor will you fool my loyal subscriber base who has waited 4 months for a post from me.

This morning my Twitter feed has been like some disgusting game of hot potato with a turd of Google propaganda.

SSL ALL THE THINGS!!!

— Jon Henshaw (@RavenJon) August 7, 2014

Bro you can say that again!

Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites http://t.co/5fhWiTKxA9 < guys, it's going to be SO MINOR of a signal

— Paul Shapiro (@fighto) August 7, 2014

Ok now we’re heating up.

Wonder what graph of SSL certificate sales will look like June-Sep for providers

— Chris Gilchrist (@hitreach) August 7, 2014

Bet your ass it’s gonna be a gooooddd month Chris.

Test your websites SEOs! https://t.co/NlmM6fzcMy

— victorpan (@victorpan) August 7, 2014

Some sort of tool for testing my site so this ranking factor doesn’t turn into a ranking disaster.

In progress for my own site as well. RT @rustybrick: Moved https://t.co/2Sf4Qv7nAN to go all HTTPS / SSL

— Barry Adams (@badams) August 7, 2014

Nothing better to work on today Barry? I’ll give you a pass, it’s been on the to-do list and this finally gave you the kick to get it done.

Should have invested in the SSL company instead of sinking all my money into that lousy Google authorship photo service.

— Cyrus Shepard (@CyrusShepard) August 7, 2014

It might not be too late Cyrus, see Chris’s Tweet, he’s ready to strike while the iron is hot.

Do you really think you have no follower overlap with the 9,000 other people who tweeted that SSL link? Is being a parrot your value add?

— Ian Howells (@ianhowells) August 7, 2014

Do you really need to see any more tweets? No? Ok point proven.

Now this isn’t your usual blend, this is the variety that irritates me the most. These dudes are literally running an SSL sales sales competition and loving it.

Ey Google, I know your angle with the links bros, you’re trying to protect your precious search engine, who can hate on that? But this is some crazy shit going on today, so I’ve taken it upon myself to pull the blinders up for you bros. So here it goes, sure SSL is a ranking factors, but so are my balls, brass balls.

brass balls ssl

Filed Under: SEO

About Jacob King

My name is Jacob King and I dance with Google for a living. You can read more about me and my crazy SEO shenanigans here.

Comments

  1. Jeff Matson says

    August 7, 2014 at 12:25 pm

    Prepare for shitty cheap SSLs to run rampant.

    Reply
  2. Jack says

    August 7, 2014 at 12:26 pm

    The only thing more perplexing than how that SSL shit got started…. is how you managed to take the brass balls reverse-selfie.

    I mean… what’s holding what. Light is being emitted from your face, man.

    Reply
  3. Drewfied says

    August 7, 2014 at 12:28 pm

    Ha. Just commenting cause I found this article hilarious amongst the others. Everyone’s rushing to implement something that Google publicly announces as part of their algorithm. Keyword “publicly”. I also found your reddit ama from a while back astoundingly transparent. Got me hooked sir.

    Reply
  4. Conrad O'Connell says

    August 7, 2014 at 12:45 pm

    So great.

    Know what it takes to rank sites?

    Brass Balls.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kZg_ALxEz0

    Reply
  5. john says

    August 7, 2014 at 12:48 pm

    Where is all the stuff you said you will post? That monster GSA tutorial, that no hat seo kinda thing?

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 9, 2014 at 6:59 pm

      It’s coming, no hat is getting pressed in a week. GSA is so frickin hard though, always changing and I’m always learning new tricks. Not sure if that will ever come to completion.

      Reply
  6. Lucas says

    August 7, 2014 at 12:52 pm

    You are hilarious man haha.

    Good topic, waiting more from you :)

    Reply
  7. Max says

    August 7, 2014 at 12:55 pm

    Here we go, the Rand Spifkin, Matt Cutts & Dochebag SEO’s exciting the SEO community with the bullshit propaganda. Maybe the time to setup an affiliate site pushing hosting and cheap ssl certificates. Funny post Jacob

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 7, 2014 at 5:52 pm

      Yeah something to get a piece of these SSL revenues, I want in.

      Reply
  8. how to move a site to https says

    August 7, 2014 at 1:24 pm

    Spit my coffee all over the computer screen reading a few of the replies to those tweets. Thanks for the laughs! PS – Blog more often once you stop your spam binging

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 7, 2014 at 5:52 pm

      yeh yeh, I know. I figured a couple people would get a laugh, maybe that will be my new style, if a couple people will laugh then I post, who cares about all the unsubscribes lol!

      Reply
      • Nathan Driver says

        August 8, 2014 at 9:17 am

        Stop with all the foul language and I won’t unsubscribe!

        Great (quick) write-up – too funny.

        Reply
        • Jacob King says

          August 9, 2014 at 7:04 pm

          Actually had someone unsubscribe because of foul language. What the fuck were they doing signing up in the first place?

          Reply
  9. dgerryd says

    August 7, 2014 at 1:46 pm

    Looking forward to more updates keep em coming

    Reply
  10. Priyank says

    August 7, 2014 at 1:55 pm

    Hey Jacob,

    Good to see you posting again.

    You are absolutely right. This news was doing rounds in some of mastermind groups I am in and I said what the hell. People believe everything goodle has to say.

    All my sites rankings intact.

    Looking forward to get more cool stuff from you.

    Thanks.

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 7, 2014 at 5:51 pm

      Yeah I bet, I was about to go into the logic behind this silliness, but then just made it more silly.

      Reply
      • Phil Ivey of Marketing says

        November 18, 2014 at 6:22 am

        Hey, what is the significance of the brass balls?

        Reply
        • Jacob King says

          November 20, 2014 at 3:28 pm

          This scene cracks me up when Alec Baldwin says it takes Brass Balls to sell real estate – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kZg_ALxEz0

          Reply
  11. Don says

    August 7, 2014 at 2:08 pm

    Where you been homie?
    Working hard? I bet. Are you teabaggin’ your laptop with ben wa balls? lol

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 7, 2014 at 5:50 pm

      Yeah man been on a 4+ month binder of pure spam, little sleep, mass amount of booze, other illicit substances, and a hunger to beat Google’s ass.

      Reply
      • Kaashif Karriem says

        August 11, 2014 at 8:48 am

        Please tell me you have figured out how to bypass the google page one cock block??

        Reply
  12. Chocolate Salty Balls says

    August 7, 2014 at 2:35 pm

    Google can suck on my fucking balls.

    And by that I mean my sweaty fucking nutsack.

    Reply
  13. B-rad says

    August 7, 2014 at 5:13 pm

    LOL Balls deep killa!

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 7, 2014 at 5:49 pm

      You know it, B-Rad in the house!!!

      Reply
      • Chocolate Salty Balls says

        August 8, 2014 at 5:20 pm

        I’m up to my nads in Google/SSL posts in my own Facebook wall.

        Shit is sucking hard around the block.

        Reply
  14. Andrew says

    August 7, 2014 at 9:44 pm

    Classic as always Jacob.

    It’s about time you wrote something….been too long since the last post man lol.

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 7, 2014 at 11:16 pm

      Yup yup, just had nothing to write really. I’m about to get going again, this time SEO’s heads are literally going to fucking explode.

      Reply
      • Jay says

        August 8, 2014 at 3:54 pm

        Please include something about this whole PBN deindexing shit I see many people running into these days.

        I can’t stand the thought that G will be able to find all PBN and then…

        DEINDEX ALL DEH PBN!!!!!!!

        Reply
  15. Shobhit says

    August 8, 2014 at 1:50 am

    Did’t get why exactly big G is adding SSL as a ranking factor for static websites where no transactions are to be done.

    Is it something related to HeartBleed Bug? Or they had a tie up with hosting services, as SSL aren’t really cheap.

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 8, 2014 at 9:38 am

      Well SSL is for transferring secure information, so if i have a site about my cat pictures I guess I’ll rank 1 instead of 2.

      Reply
  16. Jatin Chhabra says

    August 8, 2014 at 3:15 am

    Long time king but a justified one. Would be amazing to see that how many so called corporate webmasters will shift to HTTPS, I will only believe that HTTPS is a factor when I will see some solid proof. Like search the term “GOOGLE” and the 1st position is https://www.jacobking.com…

    Fyi… do have atleast 6 hour sleep,,,,

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 8, 2014 at 9:40 am

      It’s nonsensical really, SSL is needed for security and information, not just being cool like Goog says. There are obviously some ulterior motives here as it makes no sense, SSL all the things!

      Reply
  17. Diego Gualdoni says

    August 8, 2014 at 3:53 am

    Hello Jacob,

    what is SEO Assholes within you dashboard?

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 8, 2014 at 9:40 am

      My boy Robert made it, he has a voting script and made a new post type. Beyond my scope of geek.

      Reply
  18. Bladepick says

    August 8, 2014 at 4:28 am

    Could it be something more sinister? If google’s plan succeeds and everyone turns to buying verified SSL certs…can’t this info be used to verify who own actually owns a website or who is on record for purchasing the cert via a lookup? Wouldn’t this be a privacy issue? If so then I foresee a huge class action suit.

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 9, 2014 at 7:00 pm

      Well a lot of the stuff they do is pretty sinister, so…

      Reply
    • techmaverick85 says

      August 10, 2014 at 4:32 am

      Thats exactly my thinking behind it

      Theyve made link building pretty damn tough (cracking down on guest posting etc etc), so people get round this by either spamming or building a PBN.

      They (G) think theyve got a handle on the spamming stuff (although JK begs to differ which we don’t know much about unless he blogs some more soon, goddamnit :) ) so they’ve gotta do something about the pbn side of things.

      With whois privacy and cheap shared hosting plus a ton of tutorials popping up about how to set up an anonymous network, it seems everyone (certainly in my circle) is going all out on that front. Part of SSL from my understanding is to be able to verify who you are therefore it seems logical that G will use this info to identify networks.

      although you mention lawsuits etc… I don’t think they will be using that info. I think the requirement for SSL is for your whois data to be current, correct and visible…. which G week then use…..

      fuckers

      Reply
  19. bernard says

    August 8, 2014 at 4:30 am

    I am sorry but i think that switching to https can affect your ranking.

    moving to https means that you have to create a 301 redirect from http to https
    If you don’t do that well you will lose all your traffic. people who are use to domain migration know how critical 301 redirections are when it comes to move all the website.

    And then SSL certificates to buy…

    If the https ranking signal gets more important in the future, people who use cloudflare will have to pay the subscription to get ssl.

    It is going to take more bandwidth, more cpu, more ram.

    Web hosting companies are going to ask people with a shared hosting account to pay an extra for https.

    Conclusion:
    If google give a real ranking signal to https, they will give a huge advantage to people with money.

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 9, 2014 at 7:04 pm

      Well yeah, incorrectly moving to SSL can be an SEO nightmare, not implemented correctly and watch your traffic hit the gutter. MY point is that as a ranking factor alone, it’s so insignificant, such a small 0.0000001% if anything, that it’s mind blowing how people have jumped on this bandwagon.

      Reply
  20. prab says

    August 8, 2014 at 4:58 am

    Good to see you back. it’s one of their many (200+) ranking factors and until now i have cared about only one backlinks.
    -=-

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 9, 2014 at 7:00 pm

      Yup links are everything and then some. Onpage what?

      Reply
      • prab1996 says

        August 9, 2014 at 10:08 pm

        For onpage i just install yoast plugin and keep things simple , after ranking bounce rate will become 2nd ranking signal onpage will be pushed down.
        -=-

        Reply
  21. Aka Sam says

    August 8, 2014 at 12:55 pm

    @Jacob, on the flip site, we finally had something, we can take as White What SEO factor!

    Reply
  22. Ricky P says

    August 8, 2014 at 2:37 pm

    I mention your great article in my first episode of Internt Marketing Today. I just wanted to say thank you for the insight Mr. King and I hope to become friends.

    Here is my episode if anybody would like to see. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcGE3FDiQsQ

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 8, 2014 at 3:56 pm

      Are you trolling bro? This is too funny to be serious.

      Reply
      • Cristian says

        August 9, 2014 at 4:53 am

        And another LOL at his site! http://www.infoproductinsider.com

        Reply
        • Jacob King says

          August 9, 2014 at 6:55 pm

          Haha, *this guy.

          Reply
  23. Daryl says

    August 9, 2014 at 2:34 am

    Finally we hear from you Jacob, I was beginning to wonder if you’re still alive…
    Looking forward for all the insights you’ve learned in the past 4 months…
    I also think that you should open a members site and do some teaching in it, you could make a lot of $ like that…

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 9, 2014 at 6:54 pm

      Yeah I’ve considered it, I really have fun blogging and helping others with the grind, just have no time because of it lol.

      Reply
  24. Nauf Sid says

    August 9, 2014 at 12:11 pm

    Again a move by Google that favors big brands. The importance of this ranking factor is still relatively unknown but will be a major one in the future with security being a major issue.

    Nice year for GoDaddy ahead.

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 9, 2014 at 6:55 pm

      Nice days indeed, revenue, revenue, revenue. Thanks G!

      Reply
  25. Doc Sheldon says

    August 9, 2014 at 1:46 pm

    So, it takes brass balls to rank… good to know! LOL Funny, Jacob.

    FWIW, I stumbled across a really good piece this morning from a bud in the UK, for folks that are trying to decide if SSL is necessary/worthwhile/makes-any-sense for their site. Tim Nash put together a pretty comprehensive explanation of the ins & outs of it. https://timnash.co.uk/guessing-ssl-questions/
    Saw something else interesting too, but too soon to see if it has any real value – apparently, Cloudflare is going to start offering free SSL certs to their users, even the free customers. https://blog.cloudflare.com/google-now-factoring-https-support-into-ranking-cloudflare-on-track-to-make-it-free-and-easy #not-my-sites-I-ain’t-Spammin

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 9, 2014 at 6:57 pm

      Yup for some keywords, brass balls are definitely required. Thanks for the links, they look helpful.

      Reply
  26. John says

    August 9, 2014 at 10:18 pm

    I call it bullshit. It’s nice to see you again back in action!

    Reply
  27. Tom says

    August 11, 2014 at 6:20 am

    Well… set the whole site to SSL and rankings have dropped from 12 to 36 for a very competitive keyword.

    Google has only just re crawled and showing https now, so I am hoping this is a temporary drop before it stabilizes again.

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 11, 2014 at 5:23 pm

      Dang yeah there can be a ton of potential issues. My thought was that the ranking boost, if any, would be so small that it wouldn’t be worth the cost and technical implementation. I have a feeling cases like yours will be popping up all over though.

      Reply
      • Tom says

        August 11, 2014 at 5:35 pm

        well rankings are back to 15 again, however it’s displaying my non https in the search. I guess not all google servers have caught up yet.

        Reply
  28. Max says

    August 11, 2014 at 6:50 pm

    Did you 301 redirect all the https URLs to https though?

    Reply
    • Tom says

      August 12, 2014 at 4:51 am

      Yep, all configured correctly. I’ve now gone into a Google dance.

      Reply
  29. Ahmed says

    August 12, 2014 at 3:35 pm

    I hear before the SSL is the new ranking factor of Google. My site is not SSL mean https:// it is http:// then Can I enable SSL my site and will there any SEO Problem ?

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 13, 2014 at 9:57 am

      I’m confused.

      Reply
  30. Jatin Chhabra says

    August 13, 2014 at 6:24 am

    Hey Jacob, A funny though came to mind while reading the post 2nd time.. “And its still Funny”””

    With G saying that HTTPS is good than many of the G followers will move from HTTP to S, which implies a Good profit for GoDaddy…

    Now this could be a small deal between Mr G and G-daddy to give a close access of godaddy auction.. As we are quite using the Godaddy auction for pbn’S………..

    ??? its still a useless theory and I am just writing to see a response…

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 13, 2014 at 9:55 am

      Yeah you might need to take the tin foil hat off on that one my man. they’re getting after us in more practical way, there are surely some sick motives behind this SSL bullshit, honestly I can’t even believe how big it has gotten. That Bary Schwartz is a hell of a front man.

      Reply
      • Jatin Chhabra says

        August 14, 2014 at 9:23 am

        I will say that lets take a pledge that never to use HTTPS for seo reasons…

        Reply
  31. Shivam says

    August 16, 2014 at 1:54 pm

    Hey Jacob Nice To See You Back !

    Lol Google Just Goin To Increase Go daddy $$$ :P

    BTW m Doing SEO Without Givin a F**k :D

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 16, 2014 at 3:54 pm

      It’s so great, blackest hat5 possible, grey hat is some bullshit, total trap. Lean, fast, and extra dirty, that’s the way to the promised land.

      Reply
  32. Nirmeister says

    August 20, 2014 at 4:06 am

    I just figured something out…
    I keep on spamming and I got higher rankings this morning! fucking Senuke + GSA works!

    Thanks for the confidence building Jacob!
    Confidence Building + Link Building = Rankings (without any fucking SSL shit)

    Your the man Jacob!
    Thanks!

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      August 21, 2014 at 12:37 am

      Hahaha, hell yeah man, that is truth right there.

      Reply
  33. Troy says

    August 21, 2014 at 2:54 am

    haha great post and tweet excerpts – https or die lol

    Reply
  34. Sanjib says

    September 20, 2014 at 5:51 am

    Hey Jacob, How do you come up with such mind blowing Titles? Haha!

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      September 20, 2014 at 10:54 am

      Lol, I dunno, the title hit me before I wrote the post.

      Reply
  35. Max says

    October 2, 2014 at 10:27 am

    The title is awesome, it made my day..hahahaha :D :D :D

    Reply
  36. Johnny200 says

    October 24, 2014 at 8:14 am

    Hi Jacob
    Long time reader and have learned a lot from you, so thank you for this awesome blog.

    I have a question that has baffled me – maybe you could answer.

    There is a site ranking in top 5 for at least 25 competitive keywords. This site has ZERO backlinks, is not siloed, no keyword stuffing, does not have any tier links, etc

    I just do not understand how? I do not want to send the link to the site in public, but could i send you the link privately?

    Thanks

    Reply
    • Jacob King says

      October 24, 2014 at 8:52 am

      Could have hidden 301s my man, then all the links pointed at those 301s…

      Reply
      • Johnny200 says

        October 24, 2014 at 9:04 am

        Could be and that would be very sinister
        is there a way to confirm that? Wouldn’t a deep crawl of the site reveal that?

        Reply
      • Johnny200 says

        October 24, 2014 at 9:40 am

        i did a crawl of the entire site and there are no 301 redirects. The site is even using the exact same title & meta description on like 50% of the pages.

        Would you mind briefly looking at the site?

        Reply

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