Last year Google announced that websites that use HTTPS encryption will get a bump in search rankings, but given that it’s been a year Google has decided to step things up a bit and will now begin indexing HTTPS websites by default in their search results. This means that your search results should yield more HTTPS websites than before.
According to Google, “As a natural continuation of this, today we’d like to announce that we’re adjusting our indexing system to look for more HTTPS pages. Specifically, we’ll start crawling HTTPS equivalents of HTTP pages, even when the former are not linked to from any page.” This move is done in a bid to provide a better and secure browsing experience for internet users.
So what does this mean for websites that don’t use the HTTPS protocol? For now it seems that it should not be impacted too greatly. It’s just that if you do have a HTTPS version of your website, Google will favor that URL in its search results so technically you shouldn’t be affected by these changes, but who knows, perhaps in the future that could change as Google could try to get more site owners to make the switch.
As for end-users, this shouldn’t affect your browsing experience either. In fact if anything, this should help make your experience a lot more secure so do keep an eye out for those HTTPS websites in the future.