Ryan Pratt

So basically you are saying you have
a site which is currently indexed as http or
a mixture of http and https.

The change will then be that all the pages of
your site will change to https.

I believe this will very much affect indexing as all the old
pages in the index (w/o https) will have to be either
removed (Not Good) or 301 redirected (Preferred) to the new protocol.
(As it results in a new URL).

That is one implication.

The other is that you probably have inbound links from
other sites that specify http. These URLs will no longer
work (Including those in the Google index) and return
a 404 page not found.

Again this is where the 301 redirection is important.

You also will have to make sure that the links
coded in the site all now point to the https
counterparts.

It will take some time depending on the size
of your site and it's crawl rate (And those of
your external inbound linked pages) for Google
to adjust it's index.

Unless the proxy\_load balancer_ can deal with these
issues transparently then you will need to implement
the 301 redirects for every page.

That's my take but hang around,
Hopefully others will add their thoughts.

I'd consider this very carefully and want a second
opinion,

Hope that helps,
Abracadabra
On Sep 1, 3:39 pm, ryan.pratt wrote:

I just wanted to confirm Tim's comments :) - assuming you 301 redirect
accordingly, Google will generally see this as any other site-move,
such as from domain.com to www.domain.com or to domain-two.com.
Redirects like these can take quite some time to get processed
completely, so it may be worth taking it step by step, moving parts of
your site in stages (if this is possible with your setup).

Additionally, you can set up a Google Sitemap file, including the new
URLs. The best way to do this is to use your Webmaster Tools account,
where you can also add the secure version of your site. If you have a
Sitemap file for the insecure URLs (which are redirecting), I would
recommend removing it to avoid any confusion.

Apart from the redirect, the main thing I would consider is that
managing secure connections is a bit more resource-intensive than non-
secure connections and therefore your server (or whatever is handling
these connections) will generally see more load than before. It would
be a good idea to get a picture of your expected traffic and to make
sure that your setup can scale appropriately.

Hope it helps!
John