Are there any concerns moving a site to https?
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I am currently having analytics issues where the non-secured (http) front end of my site is not properly communicating to the backend (https) of my site.
When a user jumps between the the secured and non-secured, it will display as a bounce in GA and I get duplicate visits. GA has a work around for this but it is messy and not working.
So my question is, has anyone had good/bad experiences moving a non-secured site over to the secured side?
Thanks!
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Thanks. It was kind of a non-answer by Mr. Cutts. Ha
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I think I will let Matt Cuts answering to your question, as he covered it in a webmasterhelp video.
The video is quite recent (may 2011).
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I've just done this for a site which was part http and part https. The change was mainly for appearance - the client wanted the whole site to appear 'secure'. This was in December, and we haven't noticed any massive changes in the rankings for terms.
The obvious thing to consider is making sure you set up 301 redirects for http:// to https:// which can be done with a simple rule in .htaccess, something like RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] though there may be other things which affect this, so check this through first (there's a big discussion on this here with various other options).
You'll need the https version of GA, and to make sure that pages aren't referencing anything on a non-secure server (e.g. an image) else users may get warning messages.
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