Moving to https: Double Redirects

[YairSpolter]

We're migrating our site to https and I have the following question:

We have some old url's that we are 301ing to new ones. If we switch over to https then we will be forced to do a double-redirect for these url's. Will this have a negative SEO impact? If so, is there anything that we can do about it?

[Matt-Williamson]

No problem - what was you reason for going to HTTPs?

If it is for a ranking boost you may find this an interesting read - http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2014/08/29/https-vs-http-analysis-do-secure-sites-get-higher-rankings/

I moved one site to https and saw no siginificant ranking boost from this change. I have seen people implement this and cause there site to slow down which has had the opposite effect.

In my opinion another big clue is the fact that sites like Moz and Search Engine Land haven't gone to https

[YairSpolter]

Thanks Matt.

In the meantime I found out that if we go to https we will lose a lotf our ad revenue (we rely heavily on Adsense) so we're going to hold off for now.

[Matt-Williamson]

In terms of chained redirects you can do this and Google bot will follow them - in your case adding one extra link in your redirect chain should be fine - just make sure you are only adding one extra redirect in, once you get to multiple chained redirects 4+ then Google isn't likely to follow them.

I would recommend having a look at this video from Google Matt Cutts for peace of mind - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

If you could possibly go back and re-point the old redirects straight to their new location then I would personally, as this is most efficient, but it all comes down to time and resource as ever and a chained redirect that goes from the original page to another location then that points to a new location should be fine.

I have done this with a site I worked on when migrating to https and we didn't see any adverse effects in terms of rankings or traffic in this sites case.

Hope this helps