Google announced on Monday that AdSense publishers can start putting ads on HTTPS pages as more sites move to this more secure protocol.

“Many websites, like e-commerce sites and social networking sites, use the HTTPS protocol to protect their users’ sensitive data,” says Google software engineer Sandor Sas. “If you have a HTTPS website you’ll be pleased with how easy it is to monetize using AdSense.”

To take advantage, just create an ad unit in AdSense, and paste the ad code into the HTML code of your page. The old version of the ad code won’t work for sites using HTTPs, but the new will.

“HTTPS-enabled sites require that all content on the page, including the ads, be SSL-compliant,” says Sas. “As a result, our systems will remove all non-SSL compliant ads from competing in the auction on these pages. This means that if you convert your HTTP site to HTTPS, ads on your HTTPS pages might earn less than those on your HTTP pages.”

Users appear to be welcoming the change. There are a lot of “thank you”s on Google’s Google+ post announcing the news.

Image: Google AdSense (YouTube)