Bing: No Plans To Give Ranking Boost For HTTPS
At Search Marketing Expo, Bing's Vincent Wehren, the Lead Program Manager for Bing Webmaster Tools, said they have no plans on ever giving a ranking boost to websites that switch to HTTPS. — In August, Google began giving sites that use HTTPS …
Context & Ripple Effects
The two biggest engines are now pulling webmasters in opposite directions on encryption. In August, Google confirmed it would start giving HTTPS sites a ranking boost, making encryption an explicit SEO lever for the first time. At Search Marketing Expo, Bing's Vincent Wehren responded that Bing has no plans to follow suit and never will — a direct refusal to match a rival's signal change.
For Bing, the stance sits awkwardly next to its own security push: back in January the company began rolling out secure search that stripped keyword referral data from site analytics, so it already treats encryption as infrastructure even while declining to treat it as a quality signal. Site owners now have one engine paying for HTTPS and one explicitly refusing to.
First-order effects
- SEOs planning HTTPS migrations lose their clean business case: the cost of certificates and redirects now buys ranking credit from Google alone, since Bing has ruled out any equivalent boost.
- Bing differentiates its webmaster guidance from Google's at SMX, positioning its ranking advice as independent rather than following Google's lead.
Second-order effects
- Sites weighing encryption purely on SEO terms may prioritize Google visibility over Bing, tilting optimization effort toward whichever engine pays for the signal.
- Bing risks a perception gap among security-conscious publishers, who must justify HTTPS spend internally without universal search-engine support.
Third-order effects
- If the engines stay split, encryption adoption splits by driver — rewarded by Google as a ranking factor, pushed elsewhere by browsers and security advocates rather than search algorithms — fragmenting what 'best practice' means for site operators.
- A pattern where each engine sets its own signal policy independently would make cross-engine SEO strategy harder, forcing publishers to optimize per-platform instead of against shared standards.
The trend: Search engines are beginning to set divergent policies on which site attributes count as ranking signals, with HTTPS the first major test case.