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Comment by AnabeeKnox | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, the thing stopping me moving my website to HTTPS is Google themselves!

There is no clear and unambiguous way to move my website from HTTP to HTTPS without GUARANTEEING that my search index rankings will not fall in the Google search index. This is because Google treat the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same resource as separate pages.

Until they fix this, I'm sticking with HTTP. A drop in our search rankings would be a catastrophe.

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I believe that sites that are served securely are ranked higher in Google search results, so you're actually ranked lower now than if you'd already gone through the process of securing your site.

Also, millions of sites have already secured themselves and survived just fine. I just don't know what you're worried about. Can you point to some links of this having been a problem for other websites?

I migrated a couple of my sites without any harm to rankings. Maybe a dip for a day while it all re-indexed. Best way to do it is to 301 to https it seems

Couldn't you have both, and wait till the https version starts to approach parity with the original? I'm imagining google would favor https over http in ranking, so over time it should rise

2 separate pages with the same content is penalised by Google. They are quite clear about that. I will switch on HTTPS tomorrow if Google make it so that a protocol change does not affect search indexing. My business depends on this. Do a Google search and see all the people whose websites have been demolished by dropping out of the Google rankings after implementing HTTPS. Absurd!

There are a few well documented methods to counter that penalty: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en. The easiest method is probably to configure your webserver to start sending 'rel=canonical' in a Link HTTP header, but it can also be done with a meta-tag.

You should only ever have a single canonical version of your content. Serve your stuff on one path and one path only, and everything else redirects to it.

The solution here is to serve on https and redirect http to it.

Sorry if this is obvious, but have you set up Google Search Console for your domain? (aka Google webmaster tools) It helps with things like this. It has a "change of address" option.

redirect http to https??

They will eventually recrawl it and update an index but your ranking will be in the toilet by then.

Is there evidence that this is indeed the case? I've seen much FUD but no actual data that shows that a properly updated site (301 redirects, HSTS, robots.txt) is penalized.

It's FUD. Google has already confirmed that switching to HTTPS will not hurt your site.

>Do I lose "link juice" from the redirects?

>No, for 301 or 302 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS no PageRank is lost.

https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PY1xCWbeDVC

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