Can switching to HTTPS harm ranking?
Why Webmasters Stack Exchange recommends it
Webmasters Stack Exchange answerers point people to it as an official Google voice on whether switching a site to HTTPS or redirecting between http and https affects SEO.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2012 to 2014.
What it is
A short 2011 Google Webmaster Help video in which Matt Cutts answers a viewer question about whether moving an entire site to HTTPS, with 301 redirects from the old http URLs, can hurt search ranking. It was published by Google's webmaster channel, now Google Search Central.
What people said
Cites Anagio · 2012-12 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “What will be the impact on SEO if we remove our SSL certificate (url become http instead of https)?”
Here is an video by Matt Cutts discussing a similar subject about people going from HTTP to HTTPS I presume the same would hold true going the other way. But since the host and path name of the pages are not changing I don't expect you should lose rankings if you go down it'll most likely be Google re-indexing your pages. Can switching to HTTPS harm ranking? [this video]
Cites Nick Craver · 2013-04 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How do I transition to SSL without affecting PageRank?”
Here at Stack Exchange we're working on moving all traffic to SSL. The reason we're not doing logged-in-users only is that one side of the login divide would suffer a redirect from Google every time. This happens because Google's only going to have http:// or https:// in the results, not both. Aside from building the SSL infrastructure ( details here [LINK] ), the outstanding question we have is: how do we best transition to SSL? Here are the relevant bits of our plan (testing on small sites, moving up to stackoverflow.com ): Get SSL ready/enabled (but not linked to) on all domains Start rendering only the <link rel="canonical"> as https:// Start sending a 301 for all http:// requests to htt
Cites Max · 2013-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Is there any significant ranking penalty for using 302 redirects to force HTTPS?”
The problem with 302 redirects are that they are temporary, which often results in both pages being indexed in Google - The page you are redirecting from and the page you are redirecting to. If both pages are indexed in Google then that is problem as you have a duplicate page indexed. As mentioned here: Google's page on HTTP status codes [LINK] 302 (Moved temporarily). This code is similar to a 301 in that for a GET or HEAD request, it automatically forwards the requestor to a different location, but you shouldn't use it to tell the Googlebot that a page or site has moved because Googlebot will continue to crawl and index the original location. So although you mention all your internal linki
Cites davidgo · 2014-01 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Would a self-signed certificate impact my site for search engines?”
I don't think anyone will definitively answer the question as it falls into the "Black Art" of SEO. A reasonably conservative and educated guess though - probably not a good idea - even for regular HTTPS with a correct secure certificate Matt Cutts (Googles SEO authority) is unsure [this video] , and the comments were not positive - and this was with everything done right - although I do note its quite an old comment. Logically though, having a self-signed SSL cert can only make things worse, as it does not have the credibility (and presumably not the level inbound links one would otherwise get).