How does having an SSL impact search optimization?
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My site has a forced redirect on the home page to https://. But that's only on the home page...other site pages are visible. How does this impact search engines crawling my site?
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It depends on whats currently out there and how the page is being redirected. If the page is being 301 redirected from http to https then you may lose link juice if everyone is linking to the http version. For most webmasters, you only need a handful of pages to be https so I would consider that as well if that applies to you (it may not). As Alan mentions, you may run into duplication issues if the web page can be accessed by http and https.Check out this article by Search Engine Journal.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-for-http-and-https/15055/
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Korinne
If I read your situation correctly, visitors going to the home page automatically get pushed into the https: version, yet if they do directly to any other page on the site, they can get the non https: version. If that's true, there could potentially be problems. Does Google show any page on your site being indexed with both the http: and the https: version? Or are there a mix of http: and https: versions?
It shouldn't be a severe problem, yet it could have a negative impact overall.
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