I want to direct my domain from http to https. Will this cause any SEO issues?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  David Mason: Hi, everyone.  ;I have a question about 301 redirects.  ;I want to direct my domain from http to https.  ;Will this cause any SEO issues?  ;Thanks very much.
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  Klaus Bandisch: NO :-) I recently did it and it actually boosted my rankings.
  
  http://www.seroundtable.com/google-ssl-ranking-18256.html
  
  
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  David Mason: Thanks, +Klaus Bandisch ;
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  Klaus Bandisch: Your welcome 
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  John Britsios: +Klaus Bandisch were your rankings boost probably a coincidence? I would be careful with such claims.
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  Klaus Bandisch: I can only claim from my actual experience not from hear about's. Unless you have actual experience I'd be careful with your claim as it's unjustified. 
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  Klaus Bandisch: In addition don't give me any advise on SEO unless you can demonstrate you rank in #1 for your field which you don't. 
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  John Britsios: +Klaus Bandisch just to clarify, I already admitted on some recent hangouts that our company web site has been hit very hard from the Penguin back in April 2012, due to the large grow of natural links and which we had no time to monitor to prevent those problems. Before the hit we had in average approx. 32,000 unique visitors a month and now we are ranking approx. 17,000 unique visitors a month.
  
  Also looking at SEMRUSH http://www.semrush.com/info/seoworkers.com+%28by+organic%29 still seems like we still rank in the first 20 search results for 394 ; keywords/phrases and without any efforts.
  
  Last May we finally found the time to prepare for the next Penguin update which probably will bring back lost rankings and traffic we lost, but which is not important for our business, because search engines are not a part of our revenues channels.
  
  And if you think that competent SEOs are the only ones who rank for i.e the term SEO on the top of the SERPs, then I can assure you that you missed something and that big time.
  
  And now about my reply to your previous statement, I am struggling all the time to prevent misleading information from being spread around and damaging peoples families and businesses.
  
  +Jim Munro ; admin of this community can confirm my above claims.
  
  But for the record, are we talking anot this blog post of +Barry Schwartz http://www.seroundtable.com/google-ssl-ranking-18256.html ?
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  John Britsios: +Klaus Bandisch I forgot to mention that the big joke is that our company area of expertise is Forensic SEO. ;)
  
  Fair enough? Still we do not feel ashame. Or should we? :)
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  Klaus Bandisch: It is what it is - your not alone no one in your club there ranks in #1 BUT giving advise as if they were accomplished SEO's. The proof is always in the pudding no matter what the explanation is. I personally have no respect for anyone that is a big talker or a politician that speaks endlessly but doesn't say anything! Remember that people check you out either before or after and if you don't impress then you're caught having no authority. Maybe dumb SEO questions don't require smart SEO's to answer them I don't know what the prerequisites are to be labeled as EXPERT SEO's, but if i took the time I can certainly prove that that title is simply not warranted. So if you want to impress me then NO TALK just SHOW ME and all others that need hands - on experienced help. Remember that anyone that asks you a question assumes that you ( when i say you that is general not YOU in person )have the credentials AND that anyone on the so called "Panel" has and is a by ranking credible ..... Q: would you go to your doctor knowing that he's got no experience personally in the issue you're having? Every suggestion an SEO makes is a personalized one specific for the client need and history - shooting from the hip just doesn't make it. ;
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  Steven Ciccantelli: Glad I just ask dumb questions as I doubt I can answer any.
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  Klaus Bandisch: There is never a dumb question!! Why its labeled that way gets me :-( ;
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  Steven Ciccantelli: +Klaus Bandisch I think they named it after me.SEO is very confusing to me at times.
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  Klaus Bandisch: SEO is very straight forward, actually the less you know the better your off these days. Whats confusing is what SEO's make it at times to get a buck out of your lack of knowledge. Generally speaking simply concentrate on your users experience with your site and you will win in the long run. Googles algorithms are HUMAN ones now like you and me ;-)write as you speak in your text and make sure your site looks and operates as designed on a Smartphone and you're good to go :-) lets not make an issue when there is none.
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  David Mason: So, +John Britsios, what's your opinion on a 301 of my primary domain from http to https regarding SEO?
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  John Britsios: +Klaus Bandisch first I need to clarify that I never claimed being an expert. I was talking about our company which is an entity. And I strongly believe that we have an entirely different interpretation about the term Expert.
  
  Mine is:
  
  In my opinion, an expert is a person who knows what he should ask, applying his intelligence, knowledge and experience with success to the specific case, and who is able to provide a sensible and a highly contextual direction.
  
  I must admit that I fully agree that dumb questions do not exist. But dumb answers, more than the sand of the seas.
  
  I also ignore big talkers and politicians too, but I still respect them.
  
  And if the price to become an authority is to lie, I give a damn on authority. If my advice and work delivers best results for my customers, that is where I get the authority I deserve.
  
  I have been very active in forums and other communities for many years, and so far I never answered a single question which was not evidence-based accurate.
  
  I am not related, and not willing to be now nor in the future with SEOs who are performing several tests and present the results as causations, and not correlations.
  
  I recently express my thoughts about that is a forum where they were discussing of Google+ can influence rankings. Check that out:
  
  http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-forum/threads/132125-G-influence-on-ranking/page5?p=690611&viewfull=1#post690611
  
  All above said, I do not understand why are we still in an offensive of defensive mode, ; since we seem to be on the same page.
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  Jim Munro: This makes me sad, Klaus, John. We should be able to discuss issues without having a dick-measuring contest.
  
  Klaus, our Panel rigorously reviews itself and the answers that we give. Sometimes I think we expend more effort on introspection than is necessary but the intention is to maintain the quality of the opinions that we offer.
  
  You can be assured that this is the process which took place in your case, Klaus.
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  David Mason: Bummer. I could use help, not a hijacked thread. Appreciate any advice on topic. Thanks.
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  Klaus Bandisch: Were good now. 
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  Jim Munro: I apologise for the noise, David.
  
  This is an interesting question. On the face of it, you will probably be rewriting requests so that users arrive seamlessly on the https version of a url and, because you are rewriting the http request, then googlebot would land there too and, I think, cache the https version, but how does googlebot assess and maintain backlinks that continue to point to the non-SSL version of the URL? ;
  
  That would be the concern for me but, as always, I turn to +Alistair Lattimore ;for guidance. :)
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  John Britsios: +Jim Munro I do not think there was a *-measuring contest here. I just walked in and read the answer of +Klaus Bandisch, and wanted to add some value to the discussion, to prevent any misconceptions or misleading information based on a single site scale test, presenting the results of the test as a causation and not a correlation.
  
  Please accept my apologies for the inconveniences my visit caused. And no worries. I can assure you that I will make it possible that it will not be possible to happen again.
  
  Keep up the great work! :)
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  John Britsios: +David Mason ; from my perspective, I am an advocate of switching http to https for many reasons.
  
  From what we already heard from different Googlers, there is a possibility that they may add https as a ranking factor. There are some reasons that it might not happen, but still I believe that they might add a bit in their trust factors algorithms, which may have a indirect effect in rankings. Or did they do so already? No clue.
  
  Also from the user perspective https is great option. I.e your site visitors will feel safe when they enter your web property.
  
  We are already planning to move all our customers sites from http to https, even if Google does not or will not care in the future.
  
  Users come first. Then comes SEO. If you do that the way around, be prepared to lose.
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  John Britsios: +Jim Munro aren't rewriting URLs redirects?
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  John Britsios: +Klaus Bandisch Nice to meet you!
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  Klaus Bandisch: I like and agree what you wrote so I plussed it!! If Google and Facebook and Twitter and Yahoo etc are https why wouldn't you? One can not go wrong instead make your visitor feel secure and comfortable - isn't that the key to a booking or purchase? ;
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  John Britsios: Exactly +Klaus Bandisch !!! My only and last concern about https is that it might make pages load slower, which if we wear our SEO hat on, speed is already a ranking factor and in the age of mobile the weight may increase dramatically.
  
  But as I mentioned before, we are already planning to switch our customers sites to https no matter if search engine care or not, so currently we are only working on one site to improve the site speed, and so far we reached 97 out of 100 for Mobile (previously 67 out of 100) testing with the Google Speed Tool.
  
  Hopefully we will complete the site wide implementation next week, so I can share the facts for the sake of best practices.
  
  Stay tuned. :)
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  Klaus Bandisch: You can compensate by reducing the size of an image let's say to bring back the speed but it's just a mere fraction of a second. Google wants mobile homepage to load in a second or less. 
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  Klaus Bandisch: If you want to see a poor loading site and not mobile friendly check out http://www.shopsafe.com/ "shop safe" not a secured site ( ea https )that +Jim Munro runs. Should be shopnotsafe.com Lol
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  John Britsios: You should pay most attention to the major page rendering issues which come from CSS and JS. We go a bit beyond those, implementing a fast DNS and CDN, Proxy Firewall, Google Mod_Speed, checking for server bottlenecks, like CPU, Memory, MySQL queries, etc. Then we move to images optimization, etc.
  
  Makes sense?
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  Jim Munro: That's nice guys but if you'd like to have this all out, I give you latitude to open another thread in this community and state your case.
  
  If either of you make another comment in this (David's) thread here, I will exclude you from this community. Is that OK? :)
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  Jim Munro: +Klaus Bandisch ;, I deleted your latest comment re mobile without excluding you because of the possibility that you had not read my comment above.
  
  +John Britsios ;Re your question to me above viz. "Jim Munro aren't rewriting URLs redirects?"
  
  A rewrite is not exactly the same as a redirect. ;
  
  Rewriting causes a server to process the http request and provide a different URL as if the browser had originally requested the different URL ie without a http response.
  
  A redirect requires a http response to be sent to the browser instructing it to request a different URL.
  
  To the user the difference is unimportant and would be seamless but googlebot does not immediately follow redirects although it would be unable to avoid receiving a rewritten URL immediately. For this reason I think it might be useful to consider the ramifications, if any, and why I sought  ;+Alistair Lattimore's opinion.
  
  You are welcome to respond to this comment in this thread, John, but if you deviate from it, I will exclude you from this community as stated above. I am sorry to be pedantic but this is the first time we have had to deal with behaviour like this in our community and I am unsure as to how to handle it. I hope you understand that I mean well.
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  Edwin Jonk: As far as I understand moving from http to https is somewhat similar to a site-move. Assuming that the 301's etcetera are setup correctly, I would watch GWT for 404's. But you probably will see some fluctuations until all the signals are moved to the https site.
  
  Furthermore:
  To be clear, just as there is no inherent disadvantage, there is also no ranking-advantage from using SSL in web-search, so I wouldn't use it in the vague hope that Google's algorithms will value the website more.
  
  Reference:
  https://plus.google.com/+MichaelMahemoff/posts/ZZVAS65mmw4 (Look at the comments from John Mueller)
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  David Mason: Thanks +Edwin Jonk and +Jim Munro