Is Link Weight Lost Moving from HTTP to HTTPS?
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I'm considering moving a site from http://www.domain.com/ to https://domain.com/. I would put a 301 redirect in place to make sure all of the links and traffic transfer over but am worried about losing rankings since we have many years worth of links going to the old urls. My understanding is that a 301 will transfer 90%+ of the link weight to the new url, but not 100%. Is there an exception to this rule when doing a 301 redirect within the same domain (but to a different protocol and subdomain)? Should we expect to lose 1-10% of our link weight if we chose to make this switch?
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According to Google's saying on 301 redirect link dilution, you should lose some of the weight carried by those links.
However, as Google just revealed that HTTPS sites get a slight, minimal in fact, chance to do better in search results, HUNDREDS of sites are moving to SSL. Of all the pages that I've been tracking and reading, there was no change at all in rankings by switching to HTTPS, anyway is too soon to assume conclusions, the statement was released last week, so all those sites I am reading about are just "too new" in HTTPS to take conclusions.
My guts tell me that these 301 should act the same way as any other 301 does (diluting some of the link weight), or it could be yet another way to cheat Google, but will see what happens.
I myself moved my site over the weekend to HTTPS with 301, haven't see any change, but I guess what I can loose in the 301 redirects can be gained by using SSL?
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