When moving a site from HTTP to HTTPS, will i lose value from the 301 redirect?

[SEOhmygod]

I am looking at moving my site from HTTP to full HTTPS, so i will 301 redirect any HTTP requests to their HTTPS counterpart.

All my pages in the Google index are HTTP, so will that 301 redirect reduce the value of the pages?

Cheers

[seanginnaw]

Hey Neil,

Historically, each redirect chain caused a link to lose a small portion of equity.

A few weeks ago, Google announced that this is no longer the case and 301 redirects DON'T lose any equity any longer. This update now means that domain level redirects won't result in equity loss - if anything, it's best practice to ensure your URLs are HTTPS.

You can check out the blog here - https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

All the best,
Sean

[LoganRay]

Hi Neil,

Earlier this year, Google announced they will not discount a page's value due to a HTTP>HTTPS redirect. You can read more on that Q&A with John Mueller here.

I'd also recommend reading this post that covers everything you need to know about a secure migration as it pertains to SEO: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

[becole]

Sean and Logan are right... if you properly redirect http URLs to https URLs on your site, you generally should not lose any search engine rankings as long as you're moving (and redirecting) on the same domain name.

A couple of things to watch out for, though, that can cause a site to lose rankings if not done properly:

• verify all versions of the site in Google Search Console (http://, http://www, https:// and https://www)

• crawl your own site and change ALL URLs on the site, even references to image files and external files such as .js files, if you're using absolute and not relative URLs.

• set up only one redirect (multiple redirects can cause issues). Make sure the site doesn't redirect from http:// to http://www and then from http://www to https://www..

• make sure your SSL certificate is set up properly (it's easy to screw it up so it gives errors if not set up properly).