Posted on August 8, 2014 by Jason Wright A few days ago Google openly announced a new ranking factor. For years marketers and developers have implemented website forms containing personal business or customer information. These forms (and other functionality) often go hand-in-hand with SSL certificates to lock down this private data. Marketers would work at length to redirect HTTPS versions to HTTP to keep things clean and organized. What we thought at the time was “a good practice” has flipped on end as Google turns its focus towards website security. Googles security team indicates that only 1% of global queries have been effected, for now. This comes after several months of testing changes in SERP’s (search engine results pages). They’ve also shared some best practices you can take a look at here. How much of an impact this is going to have on search engine results remains to be seen. If you’re a small business or marketing specialist I would take hard look at this new factor. While Google is on the record saying “it’s only a very lightweight signal,” this could change in a hurry so we suggest you be proactive to these kinds of changes and join the bandwagon before you (possibly) get left behind. We’ll update this post as new information becomes available.