Looks like I beat this one by a few months. SSL is now a ranking signal for Google. I switched this and a few other sites over to SSL a few months ago, while enabling SPDY and a few other things I’m playing around with. So far this has been pretty painless and actually simplified a few things. Doing this at scale with legacy infrastructure and 3rd parties however is a whole different ballgame. It will take a while for this switch to happen for bigger players not already on board.
Tag: seo

True story: For several years (2003-ish to 2009-ish) if you did a Google image search for “Washington Monument, one of the first search results you’d see came from me:
Here’s the actual image:
Needless to say it was slightly photoshopped and the fact that this showed up for so many years was quite amusing to me and many others. I’ve gotten a few emails, and quite a bit of traffic over time for it. It was completely unintentional that it SEO’d so well and for so long. Ran across the image today and figured it’s a good time to tell the tale.
I’m now the 6th Robert on Yahoo. I haven’t even found myself on Google.
It’s going to take a lot to topple Robert Scoble.
Edit: No longer on the list as of 12/26/2005. Hmm.