At SMX West Matt Cutts gave the attendees a few tidbits, one of those items was that making your site secure, encrypted, i.e. SSL enabled, is an important trend for 2014.

At the end of the session, I asked Matt if this means Google is looking to give sites that enable SSL a ranking boost. Matt Cutts shrugged his shoulders and explained that if it was his choice, he would make it so. But he said, it is far from happening and there are people at Google that do not want this to happen.

On one hand, if Google announced they would give a ranking boost to SSL sites, it would encourage a ton of sites to go SSL, which would be a good thing.

On the other hand, some older sites are hard to make SSL and they would feel at a disadvantage.

There are other considerations, such as those that sell SSL certificates would love it and it can have an impact on Thawte, Verisign, GoDaddy and other SSL providers stock price. So Google needs to consider that as well.

But as of now, despite Matt Cutts personally wanting to give a ranking boost to SSL enabled sites, it doesn’t seem like it will happen for sure. Down the road, maybe, but from my impression, it is not that likely to happen in 2014.

Forum discussion at Twitter.