Impact of SSL - switching from http: to https: on organic rankings?

[seagreen]

Hello,

just paranoid, but thought i'd ask.  We are installing an SSL certificate on a site ranking very well organically in all the engines.  This will change our site from http:// to https://.  Is there an risk to our rankings in doing so?

What might I need to consider?  Changing my htaccess redirects to https: instead of http;?  Any ripple effects from switching to a secure site?

Thanks,
Greg

[john4math]

What's your plan for the new pages?  Are you going to support both http and https browsing of your site for all pages?  If so Streamline Metrics answer is spot on.

Or are you switching all your pages from http to https?  Do realize that having all secure pages means the browsers won't be able to cache anything from page to page, and makes page sizes slightly larger, so your page load times will suffer for every page view.  This is a major reason why most sites are non-secure for as many pages as possible, and are only secure for pages that need it.  I'd strongly consider doing this, or supporting both http and https (with canonical tags) if possible.

[StreamlineMetrics]

Yes, you should configure your site so that the HTTPS version does not get crawled by the search engines. One way is to do it via .htaccess but another way is to automatically insert a canonical tag to all of the HTTPS versions so the search engines know not to crawl and index the secure versions. Here's a snippet of code that I've used before -

$currenturl= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

//Check if it is using the secure https port which is 443
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] == “443″) {

//connected to secure port, formulate the http canonical version
$canonicalversion=”http://”.$currenturl;

//echo the canonical version to the HTML as link rel canonical tag

echo ‘’;
}
?>