What benefits are there to having both HTTP and HTTPS protocols indexed by Google?

What benefits are there to having both HTTP and HTTPS protocols indexed by Google? - 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, duplicate-content to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about What benefits are there to having both HTTP and HTTPS protocols indexed by Google?.Problem :

Using HTTPS seems to be standard and more and more sites are making the switch and redirecting all users from HTTP to HTTPS.

However I have come across some large sites that keep HTTP and HTTPS both available and indexed in Google.

The only reason I can think of keeping the HTTP pages indexed is that older devices/browsers may not support HTTPS. I have found this out from my own testing but obviously, that number of incompatible devices gets smaller every day.

The SEO reasons to move and redirect users to HTTPS are obvious. Secure, combine link juice to one page only, no duplicate pages, save on crawl budget.

So why would sites support both?

Solution :

None. This is harmful for SEO, and is likely to result in duplicate content issues, split inbound link profiles, incompatibility with secure iframes, and other such unpleasantness.

The reason you see both in the index is either lack of knowledge or presence of technical issues on the website's end. Maybe they didn't specify in Search Console that only one version should be used, the https version. Maybe they didn't properly redirect the http version. Maybe they didn't use canonicals to point to the secure URL's.

Now, a website may have both secure and non-secure pages in the index. For example, let's say you have a secure site, but one page has an iframe that's necessary but isn't secure. In such cases, all pages in the index should be secure, with one http page to match the non-secure iframe. But having both versions of the same page in the index should not be an option.

HTTP sites are (negligibly) faster than HTTPS sites due to not needing to negotiate encryption.

See this question I asked in 2012 for more details:
https (SSL) instead of http for mobile users

Practically speaking, I work with a well-known university and they tried to switch to HTTPS only about a year ago...

If memory serves, their (well known) cloud hosting company didn't support TLS 1.2...or maybe it did support 1.2 and didn't support 1.1.

I forget.

Point is, they had to abandon HTTPS only/preferred because one of their DNS/Hosting providers didn't fully support the HTTPS protocols that their users would require.

Let's just say that it's best to have a website that is useful to as many people as possible, regardless of protocol.

If the issue about seo, google-search, https, duplicate-content 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.