SEO implications of changing to HTTPS

Question

We plan to install SSL certificate in Magento store and I was wondering if there are any SEO implications to take into consideration? We mean to use the HTTPS on all pages of the site.

Does Magento automatically 301 redirect the non-secured url's to secured ones or do we need to make some server side redirection of all pages?

EDIT:

Also please note that this question is not about how to set the https in use in Magento, but how to make the change as safely as possible considering SEO.

EDIT 2:

I added this to my .htaccess file to make sure that all HTTP pages are 301 redirected to the HTTPS version of the same pages:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Answer 1

Yes, Magento does automatically do a 301 redirect. But only on and to the homepage. So http://www.example.com is redirected to https://www.example.com. And http://www.example.com/x.html is also redirected to https://www.example.com. So it is advisable to do a .htaccess redirect which takes into consideration the deeper pages of the site.

Furthermore you can check what happens if you try to access your site with and without the www subdomain in relation to http and https. In some cases both are accessible which you do not want because of duplicate content.

EDIT: Also check your setting for System > Configuration > General > Web > Url Option > Auto-redirect to Base URL

BONUS EDIT: While you are at it. In most cases the CMS homepage is also accessible trough www.example.com/home. You might want to redirect that page to to avoid another case of duplicate content.

Answer 2

Moving to https is usually causes bump of positions in serp.

If you want to minimise the consequences let crawler to index urls with https first and only after it is done place 301 redirect.

You can do for this:

• change canonical tags (place there urls with https);
• change links in your content (it is hard, but do it if possible);
• change links in template.
• update sitemap.