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Today's question comes from Roelant in the Netherlands who
wants to know if a website goes SSL, that's like https,
secure, entirely, can it harm ranking even if done right?
No speed loss, http does 301 to https.
Existing incoming links would still be http and it's assumed
that forwarding-links are valued less by Google than
links to the page itself.
So essentially this person wants to know can I go https
and be able to rank with no major problem.
Well if you go to Google and you do a search for PayPal, I
believe PayPal has switched to https.
So that's a good example I like to show that websites can
rank even if they're only using a secure version.
And they're doing 301's and everything else.
Now that said, it's still relatively uncommon for site
to try this.
So even though I'm not aware of anything in the code that
would prevent it from working perfectly, I would definitely
test a little bit first. If you have, for example, two or
three domains, I might test it with the domain that gets the
least amount of traffic first. And that's just a good rule of
thumb anytime you're moving from like one domain to
another domain.
If you can move a subdirectory first or just run some tests
to sort of see whether things go OK.
To the best of my knowledge, I don't know of any reason why
you wouldn't be able to rank with just https.
And the fact that PayPal does shows that
it's definitely possible.
It's just I haven't seen a lot of sites do it right now.
So if you do, leave a comment in the comments for this video
and let us know how it went.