How https affect SEO | SocialExcerpts

Most browsers display a warning to users when visiting a ‘secure’ site that contains a mixture of encrypted and unencrypted content. Ever wondered what that means? Why such a ‘warning’?

Https protocol was introduced so that you can send or receive sensitive information. However, these days most of the sites have crossed over to https. In simplier words, https is the web protocol that puts a stricter security level than the usual data transfer protocol – http (hypertext transfer protocol). The “S” in the end stands for “secure”. So https becomes hypertext transfer protocol secure.

About a year ago, Google managed another use of this protocol. They shifted their domain to https for every user who was logged-in. The main purpose of this switch was to allow the users more privacy. But what does this actually mean? When a user reaches some website from Google’s organic search while being logged into the Google account, it will reach through the https protocol. Here comes the real problem, if the site is not https enabled, the data about the user including all the keywords he used to search is lost both in the site’s traffic tracking logs and Google analytics. To resolve this, Google offered to switch the sites to https protocol. The search results will still not be available on Analytics; at least the site log will work well.

The answer was very simple – cross over to the secure site and things will go well. This will was going to have a direct impact on the SEO work already done on the page.

Http and https domains are not treated equally by Google. This means shifting to https is almost like suddenly changing a domain name or adding www to the domain, which will require some steps like redirection from one site or canonical links. Second, all the links to this new site has to be changed for match with the new url structure, including all the incoming and internal links. Once the switch is complete, the site will lose its ranks for most of its ranked terms. This could be either temporary or permanent; Google cannot guarantee which one it would be for the said domain.

The performance of the site may decline as well. Since the server is now loaded with redirects, which is time consuming on its own; it will take time to load.

Even if we keep the SEO problem aside, there are other issues to consider. For example, if you have managed to solve the data collecting issue from https sources, how are you going to collect data from the http domains? They are not the same.

After you have gone through this article and have read about the negatives, as a site owner, do you think is it worth it to convert to https domain and lose on all the SEO?