#1 rankings on both HTTP and HTTPS vs duplicate content
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We're planning a full migrate to HTTPS for our website which is accessible today by both **www.**website.com, **http://**www.website.com as well as **https://**www.website.com.
After the migrate the website will only be accessible by https requests and every other request (Ex. www or http) will be redirected to the same page but in HTTPS by 301 redirects.
We've taken a lot of precautions like fixing all the internal links to HTTPS instead of HTTP etc.
My questions is: What happened to your rankings for HTTP after making a full migrate to HTTPS?
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Hi Olivia -
Thanks for the question. It's definitely a good one to wrap your head around as anytime you change URLs it's a large undertaking and a lot that can go wrong.
What should happen when you move from HTTP -> HTTPS and have done everything correctly (not chaining redirects, etc) is that your HTTP pages will stop ranking in favor of your HTTPS pages which should take their place. Some people have seen a small improvement in rankings from moving to HTTPS, but for the most part people just saw a swapping out of the ranking URL to the HTTPS URL.
Make sure you annotate Analytics when this goes live so you can make some correlations from the move. Sometimes people have seen an increase in clickthrough rate because users subconsciously trust HTTPS sites more.
Good luck!
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To be honest, not a lot. Some people see slight increases, some people see slight decreases.
It's something Google has been quite savvy with since it encouraged everyone to make the upgrade so I wouldn't worry at all.
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