SEO implications of serving a different site on HTTPS vs. HTTP
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I have two sites: Site A, and Site B. Both sites are hosted on the same IP address, and server using IIS 7.5. Site B has an SSL cert, and Site A does not. It has recently been brought to my attention that when requesting the HTTPS version of Site A (the site w/o an SSL cert), IIS will serve Site B...
Our server has been configured this way for roughly a year. We don't do any promotion of Site A using HTTPS URLs, though I suppose somebody could accidentally link to or type in HTTPS and get the wrong website.
Until we can upgrade to IIS8 / Windows Server 2012 to support SNI, it seems I have two reasonable options:
- Move Site B over to its own dedicated IP, and let HTTPS requests for Site A 404.
- Get another certificate for Site A, and have it's HTTPS version 301 redirect to HTTP/non-ssl.
#1 seems preferable, as we don't really need an SSL cert for Site A, and HTTPS doesn't really have any SEO benefits over HTTP/non-ssl.
However, I'm concerned if we've done any SEO damage to Site A by letting our configuration sit this way for so long. I could see Googlebot trying https versions of websites to test if they exist, even if there aren't any ssl/https links for the given domain in the wild... In which case, option #2 would seem to mostly reverse any damage done (if any). Though Site A seems to be indexed fine. No concerns other than my gut.
Does anybody have any recommendations? Thanks!
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I would recommend option #1.
It's common for sites without SSL certs not to resolve properly at the HTTPS version of their URLs, and Google handles this fine.
You could pull the log files and take a look at how often Googlebot / other users request HTTPS versions of that site A's URLs, to determine if that SSL/redirect set up is necessary. But I would not anticipate any significant negative impact on traffic letting the HTTPS version of site A kick a 404 or server error.
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The biggest concern in my mind would be possibly having duplicate content issues and a non-desired version of the page(s) indexed versus what you want.
I think if you have a lot of links to the non-SSL version and are using your SSL version as preferred (or vice versa) you're living a lot of link equity / juice on the table and that when you fix this issue you may see a nice jump in overall trust/ranking once you fix the issue and correctly 301 the non-preferred to preferred.
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