Will Switching to HTTPS Lower My Domain Authority?

[O2C]

Hi All,

I had a quick look online but couldn't find any information regarding this so thought I would ask. Please point me in the right direction if it has been asked before of if there are any useful articles online.

We are currently in the process of switching one of our clients old sites from http to https, we have done all of the steps except from making the https version the main domain, or 301ing the http version to the https version.

If we were to do this would we expect to see a drop in domain authority? a drop in keyword rankings? or is there anything else we should be worried about?

Thanks Mozzers

[Deacyde]

I'm going through this right now, am a month and two weeks into it so far.

I went through the whole site to confirm no http urls were hardcoded that all urls used either relative or //site.com, images and resources too if you host your own.

After that I made a new google webmaster site for the https version I was about to redirect to. So I could monitor the amount of pages indexed compared to the http site,

As long as you have the redirect in order, there shouldn't be a reason to lose Domain Authority, since moving to a https sitewide is promoted in google seo, via the indexing more of https sites as long as you followed their guidelines: https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html

As far as I've read and understood, you're more likely to lose DA from losing a high DA backlink, being penalized, loosing a good chunk of indexed pages from google, and so on. Converting to an https sitewide is improving your site and the user experience via adding that extra layer of security, which I haven't heard of penalizing a site for that yet.

Keyword rankings I feel have better chance of improving over time, long term that is, since users will tend to want to click on https sites when choice is with an unsecured site, especially when using credit cards, so that would improve your ranking signals overall.

Just make sure your https site is gaining indexed pages and the http site will drop in total and you're doing great! Keep up any 404 fixes prompt to keep index rate constant.

Hope this helps!

[KaneJamison]

There's a couple of questions to answer here. The first is the difference between asking "Will our Domain Authority Decrease?" versus "Will our Traffic & Rankings Decrease?". The second question is more important so I'll cover that first.

The official answer from Google is that, no, your traffic and rankings will not decrease. In practice, however, a number of people have seen 5-15% traffic drops for weeks or months after the transfer - even when completed correctly. The general assumption is that this is due to creating redirects for http -> https, which traditionally reduces the value of your inbound link profile.

With that said, it's small enough that you can recover quickly with some link reclamation - basically you should update the links you have control over and also email friendly webmasters and say "we changed our site to be HTTPS secure and were wondering if you could update your link on domain.com/xyzpage/".

Deacyde's notes on updating internal links are also correct. You should also reference popular "ssl migration" guides like this one from Yoast: https://yoast.com/dev-blog/move-website-https-ssl/

In regards to your exact question - "Will our Domain Authority Decrease?" - this could reference the literal Domain Authority that is measured by Moz, or you could be referencing the broader concept of domain authority in terms of how Google views your website. I don't have an exact answer for how Moz handles normal 301 redirects and if they treat https redirects different. I would assume that Domain Authority might drop slightly, but that's a guess and not an official answer. As noted above Google says that your website will be treated the same, and I think that is the case within a few months, but there can be initial traffic drops, and worse if you handle the migration incorrectly.