DO SSL CERTIFICATES AFFECT SEARCH RANKINGS? (A DATA DRIVEN ANSWER...)

From Neil Patel

This article, by the noted internet marketer Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics, who revels in sharing knowledge gained through his passion, delivers the goods. It states the enormous effort to achieve highly effective SEO and the complexities of making your marketing and product sites far safer landing spots for your customers and potential customers.
Which will it be? That is the conundrum you will face as more search engines embrace and promote the ever more secure HTTPS Websites.

Patel's section entitled "The benefits of switching your website to HTTPS and the
potential challenges associated with it," allows for the reader, who is not deeply familiar with either the security risks of internet marketing or the great strides made in abating those risks, to understand the situation before diving in to the debate.
What I enjoyed most in that section was the citing of results Google is tracking on the up ticking of rankings for those marketing and product fulfillment sites, that have embraced the 'safe landing' concept and switched to HTTPS.

...But Patel Is Always The Balanced Educator

What every reader of the article will appreciate and enjoy is 'the rest of the story'.
Patel presents clearly and succinctly the cons.

'Now that we're aware of the benefits, let me address 3 common challenges that might prevent you from making the switch to HTTPS.'

1. Google has resorted to preferentially indexing HTTPS versions of pages over their duplicate HTTP version.
   Does this mean there will there be a loss of link juice, as the links pointing to the HTTP version of the page are not getting counted?
   Nope. John Mueller clarified that Google will count collective signals from inbound links pointing to both the HTTP and HTTPS versions of a page.
   
2. Although you can get an SSL certificate for free, the costs can shoot up to $1,499/year if you opt for a certificate from a provider like Symantec. And, if your website is huge, then the costs associated with encrypting the transferred data can add up to a significant amount. Such high costs aren't justifiable for small business owners with limited budgets.
   
3. If you don't get it right, then you might end up with duplicate content issues, with both HTTP and HTTPS versions of your page getting indexed. Different versions of the same page might also show up in search results.

To me, the straw that broke the camel's back and would force me to move to HTTPS would be very different search results. Not different because the customer or potential customer would avoid my site like a 'dangerous neighborhood' but that the search engines would give HTTPS sites preferential treatment.

Mr. Patel addressed my concerns in his section,
"Are HTTPS websites getting special treatment from the search giant in SERPs? Here's what the data says..."

Brian Dean teamed up with SEMRush, Ahrefs, SimilarWeb and MarketMuse to analyze 1 million Google search results.

He found that HTTPS is moderately correlated with higher search rankings on Google's first page.
He emphasized following a couple of pointers based on his analysis:

• Don't make the switch to HTTPS solely for SEO purposes. It's a resource intensive process and there isn't a strong correlation between the two.
• If you're starting a new website, then it's a good practice to have HTTPS in place from day 1.

These intro-segments were enough to get me to literally study the article.

We who use the marvelous internet, to market and deliver our products and services, to a customer base we hope are breathlessly awaiting our next announcement or innovation, do not need our sites or our customers' data hacked by some evil doer.

We want our clientele to feel as comfortable meandering around our pages of information and products in total safety and security, one attribute that will motivate them to return... time and time again.

The big question is 'At What Cost?'

Mr. Patel addresses that issue.

Be kind to yourselves and concerned for your customers, visit Neil Patel's brilliant piece here
Do SSL Certificates Affect Search Rankings? (A Data Driven Answer...)

Then come back and tell me your thoughts and decision; HTTP or HTTPS, which is for your internet marketing site?