Question regarding eCommerce sites, relative URLs and secuirty certificates
-
We recently installed a new SSL certificate on an ecommerce site. Our IT Director is insisting that all pages on the site must be coded in such a way so that the address bar maintains a green background when a visitor is navigating the site after navigating to a secure page or logging in.
I have worked on many ecommerce sites and never has this been an issue. Amazon does not use the green bar....but they are Amazon.
In order for this to work, he is insisting that all internal URLs be coded as relative instead of absolute.
How bad is this for SEO or does it really not matter that much? How crucial is it for trust and security?
Opinions welcome!
-
Dana,
/blog would be ok in some circumstances, and ../blog in others. It depends on where you are linking from and to. The ".." means the page being linked to is one level up in the hierarchy defined by the path. So if you're linking to www.mysite.com/notblog/filename from www.mysite.com/blog/postname you would use .. while if you are linking to www.mysite.com/blog/filename you would not.
Your developer is probably insisting this because the security certificate doesn't validate on the development or Q&A site, or possibly because you use subdomains. I don't see why an absolute path on the same domain would cause an error.
-
Thanks Streamline! Would this happen because of the ".." before the forward slash? In other words "/blog" would be okay yes?
-
Relative URLs are not inherently bad for SEO, but they oftentimes trip up webmasters if less than 100% of the links on the site are valid. For example, using a link like "../blog" will tell the search engines to go to http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog and then http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog/blog and so on, causing the crawlers to get trapped in an endless loop which is obviously not ideal for SEO. So as long as you are on top of making sure the relative URLs are always valid, then you should be fine.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
We changed our domain, I used the move tool in Google Search Console and I am having our site redirected and go daddy, and now I spoke with someone who suggest we do a 301 redirect for all pages on our site and I’m not sure that’s the correct move.
We just changed our domain name after 15 years. when I bought the new domain name I called Go Daddy and they instructed me to contact my google G sweet admin account and change all of our emails over which I did and then I went into Shopify who is my host and changed my primary domain there and then I went back to Go Daddy and had my old website forwarded to my new site. since then there has been nothing but problems with Google. my product feed from my merchant center account has been suspended three or four times now, I tried to rename and move all of my Google accounts from my old domain to my new one, but I am not an SEO person... after making the changes I have started google chats with analytics department with the merchant center with Google as they all keep saying that it looks fine but I’m not convinced because the product feed keeps getting disapproved. So I posted an ad for help and the Guy I spoke with suggested I do a 301 redirect for every single page on my old site, But I’m concerned that might confuse things further? I’ve already started the move in Google Search console And in Shopify I added the old domain back into the domains section and am having it redirectEd that way too... I guess I’m just looking to know which way I should proceed, any and all advice is warmly welcome thank you in advance Maureen
Conversion Rate Optimization | | TooFast130 -
Site Redesign - 2 Target Audiences?
Hey everyone, we are planning a redesign on our website (we have been planning it since Fall last year, but got very busy in the Winter), and some new content / design questions have arisen. Right now, we are a "digital media" agency, and we offer video, design, and marketing services. So we do web videos, motion graphics, websites, seo, really a little bit of everything except for 3d modeling. What we are really trying to sell is the combination of these services (we may create a web video and redesign a groups website, then manage their adwords and marketing campaigns) and become our audiences "Go To" digital media agency. We were toying with the idea of giving visitors the option of picking from one target audience or another when they arrived at the home page, and their experience would be customized to best fit the needs of that particular audience from there on out. For example, on our homepage we were thinking of display our overview and value proposition (which would be the same, no matter which target audience group you were a member of), then asking if the visitor was a "Small Business Owner looking for guidance" or a "Marketing Director looking for outsourcing partners", then based on what option they chose, they'd be directed to a corresponding landing page optimized for converting this audience. We were worrying this may drop our domain or page authority for our home page, since these aren't really keywords that we'd normally be trying to rank for. We understand that it is ideal to have 1 "niche" target audience, but we found that we heavily service both audiences. Any help or suggestions are appreciated, thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | RenderPerfect0 -
Question On Product Review Video Production
We are looking to make reviews of many of the products we have on site (staff reviews). The only problem I am having is our products are not stored at our office (nor can they be as they weigh hundreds of pounds and are super expensive to ship). So what would be a good solution to show in the video? Should we just do a slide share of still shots of the products with a voice overlay or try something more of a hybrid that uses a whiteboard? The products themselves cater to gardeners and the DIY crowd so it doesn't need to be super involved.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Ecommerce Store Sales
I am the webmaster/developer/seo guy for my company's online stores. Of course doing this gets a lot of pressure based on the sales the websites are bringing in. In the past month or so, we've had a somewhat steep dropoff of sales and I've been having an extremely hard time figuring out why. I have researched our visits, and those are staying steady, our ranks have actually gone up for a few of my targeted keywords, the sites are working fine, all statistics seem like everything is normal other than the amount of sales. So the question is: does anyone else here run an Ecommerce store that has run into this kind of problem? Have you found any outside influences from google or other search engines that have had this kind of effect that you wouldn't normally think of looking at? I'm just completely out of ideas for things to check... it may very well be they need to re-price things, but I want to make sure I've done my due diligence to find anything I may be able to fix! Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Ask_MMM0 -
Site Design for SEO & Conversions
This is a Real Estate Website focusing on a local market. What would you change about this site for SEO Purposes? What would you change for Conversion Purposes? What would you change for Visual Appeal and User Experience? Thank you all for your help on this one. http://www.bronxpad.com
Conversion Rate Optimization | | bronxpad0 -
Paywall usage question on First Click Free
We have some list pages on our site that we would like to use a paywall for to get users to do a free registration. The first 2 times they view a "list" page (from anywhere) they see the content fine. If the user registers or logs in they can see all content. My question is if a user hits our site and they look at 2 list pages. They leave the site and then via a google search result they find another one of our list pages. When they click on that they get to our site but the paywall pops up. Is this a problem? First Click Free documentation says that they must be able to get there on the first try. Since we let people look at 2 lists free are we ok? Does googlebot have an issue crawling our site if we do that? Without the paywall our conversion rate was about 1-2%. Thanks
Conversion Rate Optimization | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
Spam to site with GMail addresses - any way to resolve.
We are noticing more and more spam around: Customer Name: Sylvia Abernathy Customer Email: sylviaa386@gmail.com Customer Phone Number: Service Type Requested: Please Choose From List Service description: We found your weblisting on one of the back pages of Google. Wouldn’t you rather be up front? Our experts in Search Engine Optimization can help you become more visible and more productive. A quick email will get you details. This is from a site around auto and truck service and is an actual cut and paste. My question is twofold: Is there a way to report individual Gmail addresses to Google as purveyors of spam and beyond a capcha, is there any other work around? This is form to schedule a service appt. so they are not emailing to an info@etc.com type address. It is a contact form. Thanks
Conversion Rate Optimization | | RobertFisher0 -
14,000+ links a to one site - is this a problem?
First, thanks to those who have helped me before. Second, according to Google Webmaster there are about 14,765 external links to my site. According to Open Site Explorer I have 22. So a couple of questions: 1. Why such a discrepancy? 2. Of the 14,765 links shown in Google Webmaster 14,665 are all from one place and all link to my home page. The site is interiordesignproductfinder.com. In August of this year I bought a sponsorship there. There are several of these sponsors so which show up on a rotating basis. Will having 14,765 links all of a sudden showing up be grounds for some type of a Google downgrade? Why are there 14, 765 links instead of just one. Is a new link created every time our sponsorship rotates to the page? Another thing, in the past couple of months our conversions have dropped significantly. we average about 180 visits a day with a 50% bounce rate. Is there anything obvious thatt might have caused this drop? Thanks for any insights. Don www.uniquegiftsanddecor.com
Conversion Rate Optimization | | uniquegifts-2778790