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I would like to set up a new business site. I plan to direct www.example.com to example.com and only use that domain. My plan is also to only use HTTPS and not HTTP.

Does this affect the SEO for the site? E.g. do Google put lower or higher rank for sites that is only available via HTTPS?

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SSL makes a difference. See correction below:

Google doesnt care, but it may be a waste of your bandwidth.
The common approach is to use non SSL on pages where data is not entered into forms or form values are processed and SSL on pages where they are.

Google sees an https:// and http:// request as the same. But will see the www.example.com and example.com as two seperate sites.

Most sites just use the https:// on pages where user logs in, gives credit card, edits his/her information, etc. On pages where someone just reads information such as home page, or terms, or privacy policy, blog artices and so on its best not to force HTTPS.

Correction - 1/23/15

as of August 2014 Google prefers SSL http://searchengineland.com/seo-industry-tweets-reactions-googles-ssl-ranking-boost-199510

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  • I make sure that all files come from an https connection, images, css etc, the reason for this is IE loves to put out messages that some files are not secure and that scares some users off. --- Another approach is the use an Iframe for the login box, and have the rest of the site load in standard http. the drawback is that the user wont see the https lock on their url, the positive is that it will be secure, and only use https where its needed. www.chase.com uses this approach.
    – Frank
    Oct 18 '10 at 11:58
  • chase.com is an awful example. they don't even allow special characters in their passwords. && also, google does not have to see www.d.com and d.com as two different sites if you tweak google analytics a little. the google analytics help tells you exactly how to do that.
    – robertpateii
    Oct 18 '10 at 12:46
  • @Frank - "will see the www.d.com and d.com as two seperate sites" - that is not correct. "If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this." - mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization
    – danlefree
    Oct 18 '10 at 15:16
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    @danlefree That is only relevant for the URL removal tools (where users want to remove content that's already removed or blocked). For web-search in general, URLs with or without "www", or using https:// or http:// are all considered unique, so using canonicalization techniques is a good idea.
    – John Mueller
    Oct 19 '10 at 10:30
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    @Frank Yes, I'm certain that Google treats http and https URLs as separate URLs for crawling, indexing and ranking (I work with the web-search team here at Google). Doing canonicalization with a 301 redirect like you mentioned is a great way to solve this :)
    – John Mueller
    Oct 23 '10 at 18:25
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Google ranks HTTPS sites higher. Well-configured HTTPS sites are also a lot faster (thanks to SPDY), and that also affects ranking. The HTTP site is considered separate from the HTTPS site, and to avoid duplicate content you need to pick one of the sites (normally the HTTPS one) as canonical. See here for more info on redirects, linking, and transitioning a high-profile website.

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  • HTTPS is only faster than HTTP when you're talking about SPDY.
    – Andrew Lott
    Jan 22 '15 at 17:15
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It is my experience that offering a page only via HTTPS sometimes leads to problems.

We had the problem that digg.com doesn't like our page via HTTPS, and thus we couldn't add our page to Digg. There are some other examples where we had similar problems. If you consider that a link from Digg may be part of your SEO work, HTTPS-only mode may be bad.

Also, some (maybe older) web crawlers don't like HTTPS (you can see that in your logs if you offer a redirect).

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From an SEO standpoint, it's not necessarily bad to force HTTPS. From a User Experience perspective however, it's usually not a great idea. Forcing HTTPS will use more bandwidth, and more resources on your server, which will result in a someone degraded User Experience. This could potentially cause your site to have a higher Bounce Rate, which in turn can lead to your site ranking lower. As John Mueller pointed out above, HTTPS can also cause some scary warnings to pop-up which could scare away potential users, and also further increase the Bounce Rate.

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