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
-
No Redirects In Place After Transfer To New Site With Same Domain :(
Hi Moz Folks, I'm new here and am loving all the information! Can't wait to dig in more. Folks, I have a situation and would love to hear more about your experiences here and what advice you all have to give. I have a client whose SEO I helped out with about 4-5 years ago. It went well and they had historically been ranking on pages 1-2 for the majority of their targeted keywords. Client and I lost touch over the years, but now we are in process of working together again. What I learned today is that my client redesigned the entire old site without placing any redirects and entirely creating new URL structures (I already hear the gasps of air of those reading this). Long story short - you guessed it - rankings/traffic has dropped and the old pages have fallen out of index. Considering that I was hired to re-do and re-audit the SEO of the site and also considering that the domain had a relative decent standing in the rankings in the past, I'm wondering what exactly I should do of the following options (or please do suggest other options): 1. We have the ability to completely revert back to the old site with all the old keywords and and search optimized URLs. The new site was launched just 2 weeks ago and the owner has said that he is willing to revert back to the old site while we audit the new site and get all of the proper optimizations in place. This would be a great option if it will help us because at least we can get a site up that we know ranked well with Google in the past. 2. 302 redirect the old URLs to the somewhat appropriate page on the new site while - in the meantime - I work on the new site structure and keywords/SEO optimizations. I say 302 because a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new pages may only do me so good because I would plan on changing the keywords/URL structures of the new site anyway. Once finished with the optimizations, I'd then 301 redirect to the new appropriate pages 3. 301 redirect everything from the old site to the somewhat appropriate page on the new site right away. Then, once I've completed all the appropriate optimizations, I'd need to re-301-redirect to the new pages I've created. As you can see, I'm in a bit of a jam. But, considering that the new site was launched just about 2 weeks ago, maybe there's some hope here. Thanks fellow Mozzers! Hopefully that all makes sense. Cheers!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | pfarsaii
Nickname: "P-drama"0 -
UX and/or Conversion Help for Ecommerce
Good Morning, We recently revamped and relaunched our ecommerce website and we believe we have built a great site that is easy to navigate, find what you're looking for, get all details, and purchase. We were hoping to get some of the Moz community to take a look at the site and let us know if you have any suggestions on usability or conversion techniques that we could implement to improve user experience and amount of orders placed. You can view our site here Looking forward to your feedback. Thanks in advance
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Prime850 -
Should I add social media icons to homepage of ecommerce site?
... In particular Facebook likes for social proof and credibility? (We have 1.7k likes, more than most competitors). Aimed at the higher end of the market, I've tried to keep the aesthetic a bit more pared down. But, perhaps this needs to be made more prominent?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Coraltoes770 -
Advice and recommendations for ecommerce CMS
One of my clients uses oscommerce as the CMS for their ecommerce websites. I think it it quite dated and inflexible for layout and design purposes. We have been looking at Woocommerce plugin with Wordpress as an alternative. Client has the following minimum requirements: 1. Ability to Manually enter and edit existing orders/ 2. Export Orders and Sales Tax Information to QuickBooks etc. 3. Sync inventory with Quickbooks POS. 4. One Page Checkout 5. Ability to either send out directly or through third party integration, a email marketing service to customers. 6. The site needs to be SEO'ed thoroughly so SEO is a top priority. Anyone have any experience with Woocommerce? So far, Woocommerce looks pretty exhaustive, but I am unable to contact WooCommerce for support unless I purchase their theme or extension plugins. Thoughts, advise, recommendations?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | amitramani0 -
Video for Ecommerce
Hi all- I am currently making videos to put on our site about some of our products. The same video will appear on a few different product pages as they will be about the category of products (i.e. how many gumballs fit in a few different size jars). My questions are: Should I worry about duplicate content issues if the rest of the page is unique? and for hosting the videos/SEO: Should I put the videos on youtube or use another hosting service. I don't think any of these are going to go viral, it's mostly about more content on the page to increase conversions. Any thoughts would be appreciated Thanks Ken.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | CandymanKen0 -
What is the best solution to track conversions on local plumbing site (non-mobile)?
What is the best solution to track conversions on our local plumbing site? 95% of leads coming from phone calls, the rest – from the contact form we have on every page. Is there a reliable solutions to track conversion rate for non-mobile local site? As a side note, we have 6 different phone numbers on our site that users can call in order to reach us.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | dinok_ya0 -
Is it better to get a new site instead of maintaining a category? I'm stuck.
If you had a website "Food for Dogs" and: Food for German shepherds was improving in search traffic & conversions Snack Food for German shepherds had no change and never resulted in conversions but resulted in many leads for #1 Food for Poodles was unchanged but improving conversions Here's the kicker... Food Container for Dogs was super high traffic but with no conversions or any activity to other categories Would you redirect "food container for dogs" to a different site and delete that tab from the original site completely? It's still related but does not offer any $ value or leads to any of the other categories. Just note that we have a different interest in this category that will support the other categories at one time, but not any time soon. We also have a major group on LinkedIN that's grown to thousands of members for the "food container for dogs" category. On top of it all, the "food container for dogs" has been increasing in rank on Google for several keyphrases to positions 2-5 (nationally) Other important question: Would keeping "food container for dogs" influence the ranking of the other keywords? (by dilution of the site's PR or any other reason?)
Conversion Rate Optimization | | HMCOE0 -
Ideal product page conversion/retention rate for eCommerce sites
Hi SEOmoz-ers, I was wondering if anyone has data regarding product page abandonment rate (% of potential customers that leave the site after seeing product pages) for websites like Overstock, REI or Zappos? As you may know the above mentioned sites do an exceptional job with product pages. It would be helpful to know what some of the leaders in this space are achieving in terms of conversion rate. What is your personal opinion about this? Thanks,
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Kush_VMI
Kush0