Does changing from HTTPS to HTTP kill my backlinks?

Does changing from HTTPS to HTTP kill my backlinks? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, https, googlebot to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Does changing from HTTPS to HTTP kill my backlinks?.Problem :

I had only my main page changed to HTTP to test out if I want to change from HTTPS to HTTP. All my backlinks are to my HTTPS site. Will I lose all of my backlinks and have to start over when switching to HTTP?

Solution :

Google will switch between https and http (and vice versa) without any noticeable link juice loss - as long as the links (apart from prefix) are identical.

However if you want to make sure that your links return to http, and not leave it to Google or chance, then a 301 redirect will force the change.

Note that Google has stated that their Googlebot now automatically tests to see whether it is possible to serve pages via https without issue, whether you include hard coded https links or not, however they won't override a hardcoded http links.

They have also stated that they are beginning to provide a small preference to sites served via https so if your site is correctly setup for it, then it is preferable for rankings.

Basically if your site is setup correctly for https I am not sure why you'd want to go back to http as a secure connection increases trust for your customers and is preferred by Google.

LetsEncrypt and services such as Cloudflare provide free trusted certificates for your site.

If the issue about seo, google-search, https, googlebot is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.