Matt Cutts had a few things to say at  SMX West regarding potential future moves at Google.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable wrote that Cutts would like to give a boost to sites using SSL.

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.

Schwartz also wrote an article on Search Engine Land, that discussed a softer, more friendly Panda.

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced at Search Marketing Expo that his search team is working the “next generation” Panda update that would appear to many as being softer.

Cutts explained that this new Panda update should have a direct impact on helping small businesses do better.

One Googler on his team is specifically working on ways to help small web sites and businesses do better in the Google search results. This next generation update to Panda is one specific algorithmic change that should have a positive impact on the smaller businesses.

How both of these play out remains to be seen but it shows there is no resting when trying to keep up with Google. They zig then webmasters have to zag to keep up with everything that is going on in the wild world of search.