SEO Impacts if changing from https to http (or viceversa)

[valeron]

Hi there,

I want to take the benefits (both Google's SEO rewards and increased site speed) from putting on-line my site (it's not yet live) with a SSL certificate and make it use the new HTTP/2 protocol.

Now the question is: if in the future I won't renew the SSL certificate (because too expensive, maybe), so the site will run through normal HTTP, do I risk to see changes of my pages on the SERPs? Will I lose all positions that I got?

Thanks in advance for your tips!

[ClaytonJ]

I will answer your question indirectly.  Google foreshadowed a couple of years ago, to get your site in order for mobile. They raised it a couple of times, and then in April this year brought in a  penalty for not being mobile friendly.

I personally think exactly the same will happen with https - so I recommend implement https, iron out any bugs, page speed issues etc. and then hold on without fail. It will become a positive ranking factor at some point in time above the "all sites being equal a https site will outrank a a http site" - the case present scenario.

So I recommend if you are going through the effort now rather than query it make it a non-negotiable for the future.

Hope that assists.

[Tymen]

Hi Valerio,

For a customer (ecommerce site) i had experience that it indeed was to expensive and the rankings didn't drop after we went from https back to http. As John mentions in the future it might be an extra ranking factor for Google but thats guessing... For other the reason of trust it is always a good idea. For my customer i now work with an PSP (payment service provider) which handels the payments in https.

Good luck with all!

[GPainter]

https - Google have said the ranking benefit for this is like as follows, you have two sites nearly identical deadlocked, Google will choose the https version over the none for this.

Users tend to trust e-commerce sites a bit more with an ssl but it depends on the niche really.

Normal problems from ssl is bad redirects which cause the problems, undoing is assuming you do everything to the book shouldn't have any problems should you want to go ahead.

Hope that helps.

[PeteC12]

From what I have been told, the ranking gain is less than the loss in link juice you would have by doing 301's from http to https, therefore there is no actual ranking benefit. If there was , I personally think everyone would be doing it.

Like Chris says above, John Mueller said in a recent hangout,that if you had 2 identical sites in everyway and both was josling for position, then the https would take preference but personally I am waiting for ranking benefit to atleast equal the loss from 301s before I consider doing it.

thanks

Pete

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