If you have been on the fence about beefing up your site security, here’s another reason to take the leap. Google Announced Wednesday, August 6th that adding additional security to your website, like HTTPS level encryption, will boost your rankings.

Keep in mind that compared to other ranking factors, the strength of this new signal will be relatively small. But Google is keeping the possibility of strengthening it in the future open, because they want to encourage all websites to be as secure as possible.

One of Google’s explicit goals is to “keep everyone safe on the web.” It appears that they may use their status as the world’s most powerful search engine to push websites towards adopting enhanced security measures in service of this goal.

This is one of several reasons we partnered with Firehost to launch our new gotchaSECUREhosting™ program. If Google is pushing webmasters to adopt more effective security measures, we can’t afford to ignore that. Because it signals just how important site security will be in the coming years.