Moving to https
-
Hi all and thanks for taking the time to read my question.
We are going to migrate a very small website from http to https, its a roughly 9 page site with 5 of those being product pages.
I figured I would have to set a canonical and permanent 301 redirects for each page.
But our tech guys suggested just doing a binding to https so any traffic hitting our site with a http url would automatically get redirected to the https version.
So if someone land on http://mydomain, it would automatically return https://mydomain
Does this sound correct or would we need to do additional tasks even if we go down the binding route?thanks again for looking.
-
Here's the step-by-step right and easy way:
-
1. Sign-up for Google Webmaster Tools and create individual sites for 4 variants of your website:
-
http non-www
-
http www
-
https non-www
-
https www
-
2. Set the preferred domain among the above four.
-
3. Add an canonical URL for all pages for either https://www. or https://.., whichever you choose.
-
4. Add 301 redirect from http:// to https:// via htaccess using mod_rewrite.
-
5. Use Google Webmaster Tools "Fetch as Google", under "Crawl" in your http:// sites to confirm that http://.. gets redirected and optionally submit those redirects to be indexed by Google (just to make sure).
-
6. Build and submit a sitemap for your preferred domain site (one of the https://..) via Google Webmaster Tools.
-
7. Optionally, connect your Google Analytics property with your preferred domain site in Google Webmaster Tools.
-
-
This sounds odd to me - in my experience, if you want to load one page by a server sends you another, that's a redirect. It doesn't matter how the technology works on the server side as long as the initial URL returns a 301 before the server returns a different page.
It's possible that you and your tech guys aren't really talking about different things, you're just coming at it from different angles. Could you ask them to implement the solution they're suggesting, then use http://httpstatus.io/ to test an http:// URL to see what server code it returns? That might be a good way to communicate what you're looking for. The important thing here is to stress that your tech guys can code the server however they want, as long as it has the right output (301 redirects).
And, of course, use canonicals.
-
I would suggest migrating the whole site, and 301 redirecting all the http pages to the https versions. Without a proper redirect you risk the possibility of losing any link juice that would be directed at that page. A canonical should technically cover that, but the hard 301 leaves no room for robot interpretation.
Also, why leave the http version when you have a secure version available?
-
We have been considering switching to https as well, what are the pros and cons of doing this that you have heard on your end?
Make sure you have proper redirects as well.
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
-
Working out whether a site is http and https
Hi there, I can access the following site with http and https making me think that there will be a duplicate content issue. How can I work out if this is the case? http://ionadebarge.com https://ionadebarge.com Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Bee1591 -
Landing pages showing up as HTTPS when we haven't made the switch
Hi Moz Community, Recently our tech team has been taking steps to switch our site from http to https. The tech team has looked at all SEO redirect requirements and we're confident about this switch, we're not planning to roll anything out until a month from now. However, I recently noticed a few https versions of our landing pages showing up in search. We haven't pushed any changes out to production yet so this shouldn't be happening. Not all of the landing pages are https, only a select few and I can't see a pattern. This is messing up our GA and Search Console tracking since we haven't fully set up https tracking yet because we were not expecting some of these pages to change. HTTPS has always been supported on our site but never indexed so it's never shown up in the search results. I looked at our current site and it looks like landing page canonicals are already pointing to their https version, this may be the problem. Anyone have any other ideas?
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Mass HTTP to HTTPs move
Hi, As as part of an on-site SEO optimisation process, we've identified moving over from http to https - this is also in part to ensure our on-site forms are secure. In our industry our website has a high traffic volume (top 2 in the industry), we are concerned what impact the 301-redirecting from http to https would have on our organic traffic, both in terms of how Google would react to this mass-301 redirect plus the loss of 'search value' of inbound links. Privacy issues aside, would the minor quality-signal improvement be worth the move? Anyone have experience with such a move - was the outcome positive? Many thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Would merging a site with strong DA with one that has weak DA be a smart move?
I am working on a project for a client that has two ecommerce sites each with several thousands of products. Site A has a strong DA, is ranking well on Google for thousands of competitive keywords and generating high traffic and conversions. Site B has a poor DA, ranking poorly and much less traffic. We are considering the idea of merging the 5,000+ product pages from site B into site A. How can we evaluate whether this would be a wise move with the least risk to site A?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
Moving image directory location on redesign.
I'm getting ready to do a redesign for a client and one thing that annoys me about the directory structure of the website is that he has files buried deep in the directories. For example, the images are buried like four folders deep in some cases and I would like to move all of those images into an images folder directly below the root. All of those images, however, have already been indexed by google and show up in google images. If I start moving those images around, could it hurt his rankings?
Technical SEO | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Redirect Impact - Moving From SEOmoz to Moz
Hey Guys, This has been on my mind ever since the big announcement, so today I did some searching around for some posts/talk about what the impact of their full site redirect has been for them and didn't find anything. Have they posted on this or are there any threads that I'm missing out on? I'd love to hear more about what the impact has been or any general thoughts/insights people may have. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TakeLessons
Jon1 -
Htaccess help... I moved my blog from a seperate domain to newdomain.com/blog
Hi, I need help with my htaccess file, I've been told. I moved a blog i had hosted somewhere else to a directory on my ecommerce site. I was told i would need to write something to go in the htaccess file so the sites would not become duplicate content, but I'm a novice and have no idea how to write that code. blog moved from www.whosyourmoondoggie.com to www.moondoggieinc.com/blog Please help, or direct me to the right tutorial 🙂 Thanks! KristyO
Technical SEO | | KristyO0 -
What's the best way to deal with an entire existing site moving from http to https?
I have a client that just switched their entire site from the standard unsecure (http) to secure (https) because of over-zealous compliance issues for protecting personal information in the health care realm. They currently have the server setup to 302 redirect from the http version of a URL to the https version. My first inclination was to have them simply update that to a 301 and be done with it, but I'd prefer not to have to 301 every URL on the site. I know that putting a rel="canonical" tag on every page that refers to the http version of the URL is a best practice (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394), but should I leave the 302 redirects or update them to 301's. Something seems off to me about the search engines visiting an http page, getting 301 redirected to an https page and then being told by the canonical tag that it's actually the URL they were just 301 redirected from.
Technical SEO | | JasonCooper0