Best practices for handling https content?
-
Hi Mozzers - I'm having an issue with https content on my site that I need help with.
Basically we have some pages that are meant to be secured, cart pages, auth pages, etc, and then we have the rest of the site that isn't secured. I need those pages to load correctly and independently of one another so that we are using both protocols correctly.
Problem is - when a secure page is rendered the resources behind it (scripts, etc) won't load with the unsecured paths that are in our master page files currently.
One solution would be to render the entire site in https only, however this really scares me from an SEO standpoint. I don't know if I want to put my eggs in that basket.
Another solution is to structure the site so that secure pages are built differently from unsecured pages, but that requires a bit of re-structuring and new SOPs to be put in place.
I guess my question is really about best practices when using https.
- How can I avoid duplication issues?
- When do I need to use rel=canonical?
- What is the best way to do things here to avoid heavy maintenance moving forward?
-
Thanks for the RE Cyrus. One of my architects and I came to a similar conclusion, but it's definitely good to hear it from another source in the SEO community on the development side of things.
We decided to implement a side-wide rel=canonical to the http URLs to avoid duplication issues, as well as ensure resources are using relative links.
I'm hoping this solves each issue with minimal impact!
-
Hi Cody,
First of all, Google generally doesn't have much trouble today with HTTPS content, and generally treats it and ranks just like anything else.
In fact, I'd say in a couple more years this may be the norm.
As for using rel canonical, you generally want to use it anytime there is a risk of duplicate content. In this case, the important thing is to use the full URL, and not relative URLs. So https://example.com. This should take care of 100% of your duplication issues.
I'm not an expert in https development (but I have a little experience) ithout diving too deep into how you serve your content, it's usually fine to serve file like javascript and images from both secure and non-secure paths. In this instance, you want to make sure your http files are calling relative file paths (as opposed to absolute) and make sure the content loads. 9 times out of 10 this works fine.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Any more input here? Are there any issues with using a sitewide rel=canonical to avoid the duplication of our https URLs?
-
Thanks for the RE, but I'm not sure that answers my question. I'm looking for best practice information about how to build https content. The noindex tip is good. I'll do that. Just wondering how the back end should work to make sure I don't get "insecure content" warnings.
-
Don't go the whole site https route. You are just creating duplicate site nightmares.
Since you are working within a cart and auth pages you need to add a noindex nofollow meta tag on those pages to start with. This way they don't get into the index to start with, also any pages that are in the index now will be dropped. Do not use robots.txt for this, use the meta tag noindex nofollow.
You need to setup 301 redirects on all other pages from the https to the http version for all pages except the cart and auth pages (i.e those pages that are supposed to be https). If Google has found any of those pages that are supposed to be http, then the 301 will correct that, plus you get the user back to the right version of the page for bookmarking and other purposes.
I
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
-
What is the best way to leverage Fiverr for content marketing?
I am currently using Fiver for cleaning up grammar, building backlinks and summarizing topics and articles. Does anyone else have suggestions on other ways to leverage the Fiverr community or any other similar services?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clickshift0 -
Duplicate content based on filters
Hi Community, There have probably been a few answers to this and I have more or less made up my mind about it but would like to pose the question or as that you post a link to the correct article for this please. I have a travel site with multiple accommodations (for example), obviously there are many filter to try find exactly what you want, youcan sort by region, city, rating, price, type of accommodation (hotel, guest house, etc.). This all leads to one invevitable conclusion, many of the results would be the same. My question is how would you handle this? Via a rel canonical to the main categories (such as region or town) thus making it the successor, or no follow all the sub-category pages, thereby not allowing any search to reach deeper in. Thanks for the time and effort.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Stolen website content
Hello, recently we had a lot of content written for our new website. Unfortunately me and my partner have went separate ways, and he has used all my unique content on his own website. All our product descriptions, about us etc, he simply changed the name of the company. He has agreed to take the content down, so that i can now put this content on our new website which is currently being designed. Will google see this as duplicate content as it has been on a website before? Even though the content has been removed from the original website. I was worried as the content is no longer "fresh" so to speak. Can any one help me with this,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, So I have my great content (that contains a link to our site) that I want to distribute to high quality relevant sites in my niche as part of a link building campaign. Can I distribute this to lots of sites? The reason I ask is that those sites will then have duplicate content to all the other sites I distribute the content to won;t they? I this duplication bad for them and\or us? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?
We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site. Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category. This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product. So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content? Is this the best way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spiralsites0 -
medical site with no unique content
Hi I'm trying to promote an ecommerce site that sells vitamins and health goods. The site owner doesn't want to add texts in the product pages because it is medical material. therefore he Currently has non unique (duplicated) content in each product page' It is the same exact content all others have (taken From the manufacturer)' Any ideas? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi everyone, I have a TLD in the UK with a .co.uk and also the same site in Ireland (.ie). The only differences are the prices and different banners maybe. The .ie site pulls all of the content from the .co.uk domain. Is this classed as content duplication? I've had problems in the past in which Google struggles to index the website. At the moment the site appears completely fine in the UK SERPs but for Ireland I just have the Title and domain appearing in the SERPs, with no extended title or description because of the confusion I caused Google last time. Does anybody know a fix for this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | royb0 -
How are they avoiding duplicate content?
One of the largest stores in USA for soccer runs a number of whitelabel sites for major partners such as Fox and ESPN. However, the effect of this is that they are creating duplicate content for their products (and even the overall site structure is very similar). Take a look at: http://www.worldsoccershop.com/23147.html http://www.foxsoccershop.com/23147.html http://www.soccernetstore.com/23147.html You can see that practically everything is the same including: product URL product title product description My question is, why is Google not classing this as duplicate content? Have they coded for it in a certain way or is there something I'm missing which is helping them achieve rankings for all sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840