HTTP vs HTTPS and SEO in 2016-17

Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites

Google has announced that going HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site — will give you a minor ranking boost.
Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit, only counting as a "very lightweight signal" within the overall ranking algorithm. In fact, Google said this carries "less weight than other signals such as high-quality content." Based on their tests, Google says it has an impact on "fewer than 1% of global queries" but said they "may decide to strengthen" the signal because they want to "encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web."
Google also said based on their tests for the past few months, the HTTPS signal showed “positive results” in terms of relevancy and ranking in Google’s search results.
As you may remember, at SMX West, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, said he’d love to make SSL a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Well, less than five months after that announcement, and while he is on an extended leave, Google is making it a reality.

SEO Concerns With Going HTTPS

As with all major url changes and site migrations, there is likely to be a disruption and loss of rank followed by a recovery in rank. There are little to no issues when switching to HTTPS, especially for SEO. But implementing the secure switch incorrectly can hurt your site and possibly your SEO and cause a sustained loss in traffic.



Steps to Switch:
Google’s own recommendations are below:

• Determine if you require a single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
• Use 2048-bit key certificates to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on your webserver
• Make sure to maintain a current SSL certificate
• Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
• Redirect to HTTPS pages by server-side 301 HTTP redirects (mod_rewrite is common)
• Update your robots.txt to allow your HTTPS pages to be crawled
• Check that your website returns the correct HTTP status code

BrightEdge did a webinar on HTTP vs HTTPS and you can view that webinar on-demand for more insight.
Source: Google WebMaster Blog

SSL Security Certificate "https" is beneficial for your business and can help to improve your site visibility and keywords rank in SERP (Google Search Result Pages).