: Will using HTTPS hurt my site's SEO or other statistics? I've set up a WordPress blog. Since I have to log into it from many different locations/machines, I've also got an SSL certificate,

@Nickens628

HTTPS only websites are getting the exact same SEO advantage, except that...

...if your SSL processing is slow then it will be slower than if you were just sending HTTP pages to Google and Google uses the time to target as a mean to judge your website quality.

This being said, on a really fast server you probably won't notice the difference.

If possible, I would force (redirect) requests to the log in page and any administration pages to make use of the HTTPS and all other pages remain HTTP. The HTTPS pages should have a rel=canonical link back to the HTTP page so Google only registers the HTTP URI and not the HTTPS (assuming you are not looking at also redirecting public pages from HTTPS to HTTP, but remember that doing so generates a warning to many people because the page "loses" security.)

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@Eichhorn148

Google's John Mueller says:


HTTPS-only sites are fine, there's absolutely no need to shy away from that if you implement it properly. There's certainly no penalty involved with running your site on HTTPS-only when done right. A few of the things that come to mind are (definitely incomplete, just from the top of my head):


don't forget the HTTP->HTTPS redirect & other canonicalization things
look into HSTS
list the HTTPS site separately in webmaster tools (it's a different site)
make sure the infrastructure can handle the higher load (SSL, caching, etc)
check out the differences wrt. caching


...

To be clear, just as there is no inherent disadvantage, there is also no ranking-advantage from using SSL in web-search, so I wouldn't use it in the vague hope that Google's algorithms will value the website more. There are good reasons to use it (and maybe soon it'll be something that's just default & expected from the start), but that isn't one of them. I'd love to see more sites using SSL, but as with whether or not the HTML is valid on a site (to pick one other similar thought), this doesn't seem like something which automatically makes a site more relevant to a user's query.


As of August 2014, Google has started to give a ranking boost to HTTPS sites. The ranking boost is so modest that most websites that have converted have not seen a detectable difference in their traffic levels. Other ranking signals such as keywords and back links are still much more important and dwarf any gains from HTTPS for most queries.

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