SSL and google rankings, harmful?

[badstraw360]

I tried to get information about how https affects google rankings, but the posts that I found are really old.

Yesterday I migrated my forum from http to https, my domain is 14 years old and because of that I did everything to make sure that the transition happens as smooth as possible:

• 301 redirect from http to https, to allow only www
• create a new property in Google Search Console with https
  
• replace all internal links to https
• activate image proxy
• change robots.txt link to https
• Submit the sitemap to google
• change tapatalk to https
• change board info
• change google analytics to https
• change Facebook and twitter to https

But now, the more I read the more Im concerned to loose my rankings, and here is why:

All my backlinks go from :

http://www.authoritysite.com > http://www.mysite.com > https://www.mysite.com

I've read that 301 redirection won't affect the rankings, but somewhere google said that you'll loose like 15% of "power" doing a redirection, so the link juice won't be the same as following a direct link.

I also see that google will have to re crawl the whole site and that would be like creating a website from scratch, and because my domain it's really old, I'm really concerned to loose my rankings overnight if I'm not creating the correct rewrite rules.

A few years back I was using phpbb, then mybb (i can't remember), then vbulletin withVBSEO, then vbulletin without VBSEO, and now Im using xenforo for the past year and a half with the proper redirection scripts. So, as you guys can see the url structure changed drastically over the years.

Even today, some of my phpbb links are still broken because I can only redirect vbulletin threads to xenforo, so the old urls go to the main site like this example:

http://www.mysite.com/showthread.php?13016this-is-a-test > http://www.mysite.com > https://www.mysite.com

Obviously that creates an error in webmaster tools..

Sadly, I don't know if it was because of the new penguin algorithm but recently my URL rating (ahrefs) went down drastically, and now with the new https implementation Im really afraid that It can make a lot of harm to my rankings.

Should I revert the changes? It's been only one day since the ssl migration.

I would really, really appreciate some help.

 

[popowich]

How did you do this part of it?

• replace all internal links to https

Did you do a search and replace for http://www.mydomain to https://www.mydomain directly in your database?

What's the best / safest way to do this?

 

[HannahP]

http://www.authoritysite.com > http://www.mysite.com > https://www.mysite.com

Is there some reason you're forced to do that from authoritysite.com? http://www.authoritysite.com > https://www.mysite.com is preferable, of course, and would prevent webmaster tools problems.

google said that you'll loose like 15% of "power" doing a redirection...

Google is encouraging (some would say, forcing) the move to HTTPS for everyone, so I can't imagine they would penalize anyone for an HTTP > HTTPS redirect.

HTTPS issues aside, if I understand what you're saying, you've left an old site running for over a year to keep the redirects (to the new site) active, is that right? If those were my sites I'd delete the original site now, since the new URLs have long since been indexed, and keeping the old site up is not doing you any favors as far as establishing an authoritative source for duplicate content. If you're worried about inbound links to the old site, couldn't you point the old domain to the new site and redirect old thread URLs to the new URLs in .htaccess?

Anyway, if that's not what you're doing, forget I said anything.

For what it's worth, I've migrated 25+ domains/sites to HTTPS over the past six months or so, and have not noticed a drop in search result placement for any of them. One of those domains is 22 years old, and 2 or 3 of them are 20+ years old. One site is the number one result for a search term with over six million matches, and it has remained in the first spot (ahead of wikipedia and several other big-name sites). So I have not seen any negative effect from the change. If anything, you can expect Google to start favoring those HTTPS URLs in the not-too-distant future.

 

[boeing747]

Hello,

I have faced with a massive drop ranking and visitors (near 100K) after SSL activation. I did everything according to instructions.

Do you have any ideas or suggestion for getting out from this situation?

@mjp
According to your experiences do you know what is the problem?