Is there any problem if we migrate the entire site to HTTPS except for the blog ?

[newrankbg]

Hello guys,
I have a question to those of you, who have migrated from HTTP to HTTPS.

We are planning to migrate the site of our customer to Always SSL. In other words, we want to redirect all site pages to HTTPS, except for the blog.

Currently, the whole site is using the HTTP protocol (except the checkout page).
After the change, our customer's site should look like this:

https://www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com/blog/

The reasons we do not want to migrate the blog to HTTPS are as follows:

1. The blog does not collect any sensitive user information, as opposed to the site.
2. We all know that on-site algorithms like Panda are having sitewide effect. If the Panda doesn’t like part of the blog (if any thin or low quality content), we do not want this to reflect on the rankings of the entire website. Having in mind that for Google, HTTP and HTTPS are two different protocols, a possible blog penalty should not reflect the web site, which will use HTTPS.

Point 2 is the reason I am writing here, as this is just a theory. I would like to hear more thoughts from the experts here.

Also, I would like to know your opinion, regarding this mixed use of protocols – could this change lead to a negative effect for any of the properties and why?

For me, there should be no negative effect at all. The only disadvantage is that we will have to monitor both metrics – the blog and the site separately in webmaster tools.

Thank you all and looking forward for your comments.

[seowoody]

Hello,

While I can't confirm this, my understanding was that you can't have a penalty on http and not on https (and vice versa). The domain or sub-domain is where the penalty would be (to my understanding - could be wrong?).

Although Google sees http://www.domain.com/blog/ and https://www.domain.com/blog/ as two different URLs, I believe a penalty for thin content would be cast on domain.com, thus affecting both URLs.

I'd suggest moving all pages to https and ensure your blog content is not thin.  If you're struggling for time to create great blog content, cut down on your volume and post better quality less often. That'd be the safest strategy IMO.

Goodluck!