Can changing site from HTTP to HTTPS impact SEO?

[virtualreality]

Our company recently added SSL and now all pages are changed from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com. Does Google see this as two separate URLs? Can this have a negative impact on SEO?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:13 pm (utc) on Oct 30, 2015]
[edit reason] changed domain.com to example.com, to unlink urls [/edit]

[goodroi]

http & https are two different urls and you need to address that during the conversion process. I've seen sites not address this or make a mistake when changing to https and have problems. If you do it right, you should see no negative change and likely a very slight overall boost after everything settles down.

[nomis5]

Just take a look at the past twelve months posts on this subject and judge for yourself. Some report no effect whatsoever, others report significant problems. I assume that a few report some benefit but I can't recall them.

What do you hope to achieve by the change?

[ergophobe]

I don't know what the OP is hoping to achieve, but we will be doing this soon. Corporate IT has basically said that anything that touches on the website is now considered part of the cardholder data environment (CDE) and so even content pages, since they will be part of the shopping session, need to pass all the same PCI compliance scans and questionnaires and so forth.

So in our case it has nothing to do with improving SEO or any rumors about whether Google counts it or not. It is simply a matter of coming into compliance with a finance/security mandate that everything be encrypted.

Of course other aspects of the security are ludicrously lax or foolishly wrongheaded, but that's a whole separate problem.

[Robert Charlton]

From the original post, I can't tell how much the OP knows about canonicalization and using 301 redirects and mod_rewrite to accomplish this... but the question suggests that the following might help.

Take a look at this thread on changing a site from http to https...

Does SSL version constitute duplicate content?
Aug, 2014
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4693714.htm [webmasterworld.com]

The discussion gets off on some side issues, so I'll quote the applicable sections below....

An SSL/https version would be either duplicate content, or a "new" site with the same content but with different urls... depending on whether you now can see the site on just one set of urls, or on both https and http.

I'm not sure from your post and question whether you understand that when changing an http site to https, you would have to 301 redirect all of your urls from http to https for Google properly handle the change.

You only want one protocol to resolve for each individual page. Both protocols returning a 200 OK header response is dupe content, and https/http dupes can be a mess to clean up.

You would need to use mod_rewrite to fix the situation. Once links to both protocols get out there in the wild, it's my experience that full canonicalization is the only way to fix this. That's something you should have had in place from the start, but very possibly might not have.

I should add that I wouldn't rely on the rel canonical link to fix these problems. I'd use 301s in the server.

Worth noting that you should take pains to avoid "chained redirects" (ie, separate redirects for www issues, index vs "/" issues, etc. These should be combined with your http -> https 301s.

[vgiseo]

My company has had tremendous success with the conversion to "SSL". It is a little more complicated than just opting for this what I will label as "A unquestionable support for your websites best possible search engine rankings." If you realize other wise? ( I can strongly suggest that you look else where and not consider a correctly set-up SSL.) "Google has already confirmed this fact." I will share that not all SSL Certificates are equal and that the proper use of re-directs and the websites "LINKS POINTING OFF-PAGE" are a necessary consideration too.