Alright, you think that this might be one of the most asked question on the internet, and you're tired reading the exact same answers. So let's focus on one of the most common answer, and forget about the others.
One of the common answer is:
"The https-site and the http-site are two completely different sites;
it’s a little bit like having a www version of the site and a non-www
version. Make sure you have 301 redirects from the http URLs to the
https ones." (source:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/seo-for-https-with-s-like-secure)
So here's my question:
Why are people saying that https and http are two different websites? How different is https://www.mydomain.com from http://www.mydomain.com?
The URI is the same and the content is the same. Only the protocol changes.
Why would the protocol have any impact on SEO? Whether or not the content is encrypted from point A to point B, why would that matter SEO wise?
Thanks for your help!
-H
Http and https could technically be two different sites. You could configure your server to server completely different content. They have two different urls (the difference being that s).
That being said, almost all webmasters with both http and https serve nearly identical content whether the site is secure or not. Google recognizes this and allows you to run both at the same time without having to fear duplicate content penalties.
If you are moving from one one to another, you should treat it similarly to other url changes.
Put 301 redirects in place so that each page gets properly redirected to the same content at its new url
Register both versions in Google Webmaster Tools
I have not personally done this switch, but it should be doable without problems. I have made other types of sitewide url changes without problems in the last couple years.
The other alternative would be to run both http and https at the same time and switch users over more gradually. As they log in, for example.
Update to above answer as on August 2014, Google has just confirmed that sites secured by SSL will start getting a ranking boost. Check official statement here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
Don't think about it in terms of protocol. Think about it in terms of potentiality from a search engines point of view.
http://example.com and http://www.example.com can be completely different sites.
http://example.com/ and http://www.example.com/home can be completely different pages.
https://www.example.com and http://www.example.com can, again, be completely different sites.
In addition to this, https pages have a very hard time ranking. google etc.
If your entire site is https and pops an SSL certificate to an HTTP request, G views them as secure and that they're https for a reason. It's sometimes not very clever in this regard. If you have secure product or category pages, for instance, they simply will not rank compared to competitors. I have seen this time and again.
In recent months, it is becoming very clear Google will gently force webmasters to move to HTTPS.
Why are people saying that https and http are two different websites?
How different is www.mydomain.com from
www.mydomain.com?
Answer: Use the site: operator to find duplicate content. Go to a browser and type:
site:http://example-domain.com
and
site:https://example-domain.com
If you see both versions indexed in Google or other search engines they are duplicates. You must redirect the HTTP version to the HTTPS version to avoid diluting your websites authority and a possible penalty from Google's Panda algorithm.
Why would the protocol have any impact on SEO?
Answer:
For ecommerce websites, Google will not rank them well without being
secure. They do not want users to get their bank info etc stolen.
Google will be giving ranking boosts to sites that move to HTTPS in
the future. Although it is not a large ranking signal now, it could
become larger.
The guys at Google Chrome have submitted a proposal to dish out
warnings to users for ALL websites not using HTTPS. Yes, I know it
sounds crazy, but check
this out.
Info taken from this guide on how to move to HTTPS without killing your rank.
Recently, if SSL is inactive in Firefox browser, it shows an error. You must enable SSL and redirect the URL to HTTPS 301
Related
I use BlueHost for LearnInternetGrow.com and I have all www addresses being redirected to non www. I did this so that my organic search results would start with my domain name.
I recently set up SSL for the site but may not keep it in the long run.
I have backlinks that are hard coded with http://learninternetgrow.com. I want to redirect all types of variations of the address
(http://learninternetgrow.com http://www.learninternetgrow.com https://www.learninternetgrow.com)
to https://learninternetgrow.com. I want to do it this way so that if I get rid of SSL (which comes with a premium) I don't have to get Google to recrawl the site and redo all the backlinks.
I feel like my logic may be faulty. Has anyone used a 301 redirect to send all traffic to a secure version of their site. I started without SSL because the site is just a blog without any sign ins, but I read that SEO can get a boost if I use SSL. So this is really a test to see if the premium is worth the SEO bump. If it isn't I will get rid of it but I want to minimize the work necessary for this test.
Please let me know if you have done a similar test and how you did it. If you started with an http site and upgraded to TLS (SSL) how did you go about doing it without hurting your organic traffic.
The main questions is - When upgrading to SSL on WordPress, should one redirect to Https at the server level or change wordpress settings - WordPRess address URL to https:// or should I do both.
To get that "boost" your https but do done properly :
301 (permanent) redirect
Avoid mixed content
So you need to change the wordpress address in the settings to avoid mixed content, and add the 301 redirect directly in the server configuration if possible.
Wait at least 2 week before start looking for a boots. The boost will be small but don't forget :
https is not about SEO boost, it's about security of your visitor and integrity of your website (some ISP inject ads inside http websites...)
I'm coming to you because I'm stuck on the following problem:
I have a website, hosted on a server on which I will be doing messy maintenance stuff (understand I'm not sure what I'm doing so I might crash everything).
I'd like to temporarily redirect all the traffic to a simle page stating the website is undermaintenance and will be back soon.
So this page must be hosted on another server, since mine will be down.
To make matters more complicated, I have an ssl certificate on my whole website, so most of my users have the https adress memorized in their browser (and that's also what's memorized by google).
I've tried hosting the simple page on a free hosting, and also on microsoft azure (because I already have an account for another web-project). However, i've encountered the same problem in both cases: the users coming to the website see big red flags from thei browsers, saying that the connexion isn't private. (ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID)
What would be the proper way to proceed and redirect my users in a smooth way?
Thanks in advance!
Rouli
I'm building a site with Umbraco, and there are a couple of pages that need to be visited over HTTPS instead of HTTP (e.g. a login page).
I've seen a couple of macros that get put on the page that needs to use HTTPS, and essentially just check the protocol used and do a Response.Redirect with the correct protocol if necessary. This seems like a terrible way of achieving what seems to be a fairly basic requirement - ideally I'd want Umbraco to render any links to these pages as <a href="https://...", not do a redirect when the user goes to a page.
With these redirecting macros, there's also the possibility of a browser displaying a warning if the user's on an HTTPS page and navigates to a HTTP one. If the links are relative, the user will be redirected from HTTPS to HTTP, and the browser may warn about this.
Is there a way to achieve this without modifying any Umbraco framework code?
There's currently no built-in way to make a few pages in Umbraco return a https url.
The only way I can think of doing this at the moment is just by making sure that you set up your links correctly.
But there's no way of stopping people from entering the insecure link. That is where the redirects come in handy though, it will make sure you don't get to a secure page insecurely.
I would recommend running the whole site in https mode. In the past, performance would have been an objection to running your full site in https mode. However with modern servers, this really shouldn't be a problem any more.
When I searching our web site on Google I found three sites with the same content show up. I always thought we were using only one site www.foo.com, but it turn out we have www.foo.net and www.foo.info with the same content as www.foo.com.
I know it is extremely bad to have the same content under different URL. And it seems we have being using three domains for years and I have not seen punitive blunt so far. What is going on? Is Google using new policy like this blog advocate?http://www.seodenver.com/duplicate-content-over-multiple-domains-seo-issues/ Or is it OK using DNS redirect? What should I do? Thanks
If you are managing the websites via Google Webmaster Tools, it is possible to specify the "primary domain".
However, the world of search engines doesn't stop with Google, so your best bet is to send a 301 redirect to your primary domain. For example.
www.foo.net should 301 redirect to www.foo.com
www.foo.net/bar should 301 redirect to www.foo.com/bar
and so on.
This will ensure that www.foo.com gets the entire score, rather than (potentially) a third of the score that you might get for link-backs (internal and external).
Look into canonical links, as documented by Google.
If your site has identical or vastly
similar content that's accessible
through multiple URLs, this format
provides you with more control over
the URL returned in search results. It
also helps to make sure that
properties such as link popularity are
consolidated to your preferred
version.
They explicitly state it will work cross-domain.
We have done many website redesigns before for companies looking to bring themselves into the 21st century. Most of them have low page rank when we are handed the project, so it is usually not a big concern of ours to maintain page rank.
However, we have recently obtained a client that is coming from a PHP-based architecture (we are a Microsoft .NET house), and one of the client's main concerns is the loss of their google page rank. Obviously the pages that have a high page rank have PHP extensions.
My questions are as follows:
Will a 301 redirect maintain page rank for each page, or is there something else we need to consider?
Since there are hundreds of pages, is there a nice "industry-standard" way of performing multiple 301 redirects? We are thinking of doing some URL rewriting of the PHP pages and performing the 301 redirect in the web form that we're redirecting to, but before we do this, we want to make sure there's not a better/cleaner way to do this.
Are there any other considerations we should take into account when dealing with a site of this magnitude with this amount of SEO success?
Any help, as always, is appreciated!
A 301 is the recommended way (straight from Google's Webmaster Tools documentation) of changing URL's for content. It is the "industry standard" and correct way of performing this task.
Your question is actually very similar to this one, so you could check there for some more relevant responses.
Look into the .Net Routing module. It would be a cleaner way to manage all those redirects in one go and in one spot.
You may have to set up IIS to send .php files to .Net
Yes, 301 redirects maintain the authority of a website or a page for SEO. (Most tests show that 90% or more of the old authority is passed).
One other related search engine optimization tip is to be sure that each page redirects / resolves only one time. i.e. not as a www & non-www or with a trailing / and without.
301
Redirect is Google Friendly and also Maintain Page Rank in Google. and second thing Web redesign is Best decision for Increase Page Rank and also Site Health.