: Is using only HTTPS bad in a SEO perspective? I would like to set up a new business site. I plan to direct www.example.com to example.com and only use that domain. My plan is also to only

@Debbie626

Google ranks HTTPS sites higher. Well-configured HTTPS sites are also a lot faster (thanks to SPDY), and that also affects ranking. The HTTP site is considered separate from the HTTPS site, and to avoid duplicate content you need to pick one of the sites (normally the HTTPS one) as canonical. See here for more info on redirects, linking, and transitioning a high-profile website.

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@Megan663

From an SEO standpoint, it's not necessarily bad to force HTTPS. From a User Experience perspective however, it's usually not a great idea. Forcing HTTPS will use more bandwidth, and more resources on your server, which will result in a someone degraded User Experience. This could potentially cause your site to have a higher Bounce Rate, which in turn can lead to your site ranking lower. As John Mueller pointed out above, HTTPS can also cause some scary warnings to pop-up which could scare away potential users, and also further increase the Bounce Rate.

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@Candy875

It is my experience that offering a page only via HTTPS sometimes leads to problems.

We had the problem that digg.com doesn't like our page via HTTPS, and thus we couldn't add our page to Digg. There are some other examples where we had similar problems. If you consider that a link from Digg may be part of your SEO work, HTTPS-only mode may be bad.

Also, some (maybe older) web crawlers don't like HTTPS (you can see that in your logs if you offer a redirect).

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@Angie530

SSL makes a difference.
See correction below:

Google doesnt care, but it may be a waste of your bandwidth.
The common approach is to use non SSL on pages where data is not entered into forms or form values are processed and SSL on pages where they are.

Google sees an and request as the same. But will see the example.com and example.com as two seperate sites.

Most sites just use the on pages where user logs in, gives credit card, edits his/her information, etc. On pages where someone just reads information such as home page, or terms, or privacy policy, blog artices and so on its best not to force HTTPS.

Correction - 1/23/15

as of August 2014 Google prefers
SSL searchengineland.com/seo-industry-tweets-reactions-googles-ssl-ranking-boost-199510

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