Facebook Starts Switching All Users to HTTPS Connections

I was thinking about switching my sites to https-only also, because https-only is a good thing in general, but after doing some research it seems that it's unclear what will happen in terms of Google SEO. There's even a video on Youtube from Matt Cutts addressing that specific question from July or so, and his answer is basically something like, "I don't know for sure, but it I don't see why it would make a difference."<p>What would be helpful is some sort Google-recognized meta tag that says, "this site is https only, please index it as such." 301 redirects might work <i>in theory</i>, but theory isn't good enough when your business relies on how it appears in Google's results. Even a temporary demotion could mean lots of money and confidence lost.

The biggest problems I personally have with switching to HTTPS only for my sites:<p>1. I simply don't have enough IPv4 addresses to put each SSL site on its own IP address, IPv6, sure, bring it on ... but generally if someone has IPv6 connectivity, then they have SNI (see 3)<p>2. I don't have the money to get a certificate with X amount of domains on it<p>3. SNI is still not a good idea simply because there exist still a lot of Windows XP clients that are unable to use it.<p>I am not too worried about the extra CPU cycles for the encryption decryption of connections...<p>Currently on my sites I don't have any reason to use SSL, other than that I would like to protect certain resources such that my account username/password for my personal blog don't go across the ether in plain-text. For that I currently use self-signed SSL certs from a personal root that I can trust in the computers I want to trust them in.

If you are considering going HTTPS only, please take the extra couple of minutes and make sure that your SSL setup is configured optimally.<p>I often run into setups where someone has enabled SSL, gotten the cert installed and just left things at that with no further work done to configure versions/cipher preferences/http headers etc.<p>SSL Labs Server Test is a good place to start: <a href="https://www.ssllabs.com/ssldb/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ssllabs.com/ssldb/</a>

"People will be able to opt-out of HTTPS for maximum speed if that’s how they roll."<p>Why is that even an option? This entire article is written in such a way that most users are going to assume that Facebook is going to start loading at a snails pace.<p>Turning on SSL is technically slower, but it certainly is not going to be noticeable. Perhaps if all Facebook was serving was a couple of small text files, the overhead associated with SSL could be noticed, but with that isn't the case.

This reminds me of when Iran blocked ssl connections, but I agree that security wise, they should of never been on http, but just https..