There are several reports of migration to HTTPS (using 301 redirects and HSTS) without an impact to rankings (no fluctations).
Since that seems like changing URL structure I'm thinking to migrate
http://www.example.com/cost-of-living/city_result.jsp?country=Germany&city=Berlin
to more friendly URLs like
https://www.example.com/cost-of-living/in/Berlin
https://www.example.com/cost-of-living/in/Geneva-IL-United-States
But Google do not really recommend changing the URL structure:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL4sdTcUJzo#t=1301
(they say fluctuations are possible)
Are there some recent tests (user cases) which show that it might not be a good idea to migrate the URL structure and only do HTTP to HTTPS URL change?
SeoMoz to Moz migration showed that 301 change of domains and URLs went very smoothly.
/in/
?/cost-of-living/
I could create a mapping/cost-of-living/*
although for cities, however, I think/cost-of-living/in/*
would be cleaner from the implementation point of view since I already have other mappings like/cost-of-living/city_history
etc. But it could work/cost-of-living/*
mapping since it should match the highest string according to Servlet spec. download.oracle.com/otn-pub/jcp/servlet-3.0-fr-oth-JSpec/…in
could be a stop word from the point of search engines, so itmight
ormight not
be better to include it in the URL of not, from the point of user readability not much difference