Moving from http to https: image duplicate issue?
-
Hello everyone,
We have recently moved our entire website virtualsheetmusic.com from http:// to https:// and now we are facing a question about images.
Here is the deal: All webpages URLs are properly redirected to their corresponding https if they are called from former http links. Whereas, due to compatibility issues, all images URLs can be called either via http or https, so that any of the following URLs work without any redirect:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png
https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png
Please note though that all internal links are relative and not absolute.
So, my question is: Can that be a problem from the SEO stand point? In particular: We have thousands of images indexed on Google, mostly images related to our digital sheet music preview image files, and many of them are ranking pretty well in the image pack search results. Could this change be detrimental in some way? Or doesn't make any difference in the eyes of Google? As I wrote above, all internal links are relative, so an image tag like this one:
Hasn't changed at all, it is just loaded in a https context.
I'll wait for your thoughts on this. Thank you in advance!
-
No problem
-
Great! Glad to know that. Thank you Dimitrii, I appreciated your help very much!
-
Oh, I see. Yeah, there shouldn't be any problems, if someone else links to your images with http. And yes, your assumption is correct
-
Thank you Dimitrii to clarifying, actually all our webpages now load images only via the https://, but since many external websites are hard-linking to many of our images via the regular http:// protocol, I was thinking to allow linking to them the "insecure" way if requested. Do you see my point? So... to better clarify my initial question, let's say Google is spidering one of those external affiliates and finds an image tag like this:
Will Google consider the image found at:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/image.jpg
a duplicate of:
https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/image.jpg
?? This was my original question...
In any case, I have made some testings today, and I have been able to redirect all images via .htaccess permanently (301) to https:// and looks like even if an image is requested with the http:// from the browser, it shows up correctly because the web browser handles redirects for images in the same way it handles them for the web page itself.
So... my concern should be solved this way. But in case, for any reason, I need to be able to serve the same image from both protocols (http or https) it is my understand that that shouldn't be an issue anyway. Is my assumption correct?
Thanks again.
-
I did quick search, and there are lots of good articles about why images are not duplicate content: http://bfy.tw/9Qy4
-
So, the reason I recommend having images loading only through one resource is the "insecurity" of https connection, if any resources are loaded not over https. You might have seen that sometimes instead of green lock in a browser bar, it can show yellow exclamation mark - that's one of the reasons. And also it's just cleaner, if everything is loaded the same way.
Here is a link to resource about mixed content: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/prevent-mixed-content/fixing-mixed-content
-
Thank you Dimitrii for your reply.
Well, your two statements above contradicts each other, in my opinion. You see, what really concerns me is your last suggestion:
"it's better to make sure that images (and all the other resources) available only through one protocol - http or https."
And hence my original concern. Why should we make sure that images are available only through one protocol if you say first that there isn't such thing as duplicate content for images? Why should we concern about that then?
Sorry for my further request for clarification. I really appreciated your help!
-
Howdy.
As far as I understand, there is no such thing as duplicate content just for images. Duplicate content is more for the page as a whole. Especially, since you guys redirected all the links, you shouldn't have any problems, since google will simply "realize" the change.
Now, it's better to make sure that images (and all the other resources) available only through one protocol - http or https.
Hope this helps
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
-
Ranking Issue for New Site
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Possible duplicate content issues on same page with urls to multiple tabs?
Hello everyone! I'm first time here, and glad to be part of Moz community! Jumping right into the question I have. For a type of pages we have on our website, there are multiple tabs on each page. To give an example, let's say a page is for the information about a place called "Ladakh". Now the various urls that the page is accessible from, can take the form of: mywanderlust.in/place/ladakh/ mywanderlust.in/place/ladakh/photos/ mywanderlust.in/place/ladakh/places-to-visit/ and so on. To keep the UX smooth when the user switches from one tab to another, we load everything in advance with AJAX but it remains hidden till the user switches to the required tab. Now since the content is actually there in the html, does Google count it as duplicate content? I'm afraid this might be the case as when I Google for a text that's visible only on one of the tabs, I still see all tabs in Google results. I also see internal links on GSC to say a page mywanderlust.in/questions which is only supposed to be linked from one tab, but GSC telling internal links to this page (mywanderlust.in/questions) from all those 3 tabs. Also, Moz Pro crawl reports informed me about duplicate content issues, although surprisingly it says the issue exists only on a small fraction of our indexable pages. Is it hurting our SEO? Any suggestions on how we could handle the url structure better to make it optimal for indexing. FWIW, we're using a fully responsive design with the displayed content being exactly same for both desktop and mobile web. Thanks a ton in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atulgoyal0 -
Same content, different languages. Duplicate content issue? | international SEO
Hi, If the "content" is the same, but is written in different languages, will Google see the articles as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chalet
If google won't see it as duplicate content. What is the profit of implementing the alternate lang tag?Kind regards,Jeroen0 -
Http and https protocols being indexed for e-commerce website
Hi team, Our new e-commerce website has launched and I've noticed both http and https protocols are being indexed. www.mountainjade.co.nz Our old website was http with only the necessary pages running https (cart, checkout etc). No https pages were indexed and you couldn't access a https page if you manually typed it into the browser. We outrank our competition by a mile, so I'm treading carefully here and don't want to undo the progress we made on the old site, so I have a few questions: 1. How exactly do we remove one protocol from the index? We are running on Drupal. We tried a hard redirect from https to http and excluded the relevant pages (cart, login etc from the redirect), but found that you could still access https pages if you we're in the cart (https) and then pressed back on the browser button for example. At that point you could browse the entire site on https. 2. Is the safer option to emulate what we had in place on the old website e.g http with only the necessary pages being https, rather than making the switch to sitewide https? I've been struggling with this one, so any help would be much appreciated. Jake S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacobsheehan0 -
Fetch As Google Redirect from HTTPS to HTTP
Hi Moz Community, We just launched a redesigned site and moved our blog from http://sparkline.motifinvesting.com to https://www.motifinvesting.com/blog. When I went to check the site today I noticed something strange. When I Fetch a Blog URL as Google it is redirecting from https to http AND dropping the / <post-id>from the end of the URL.</post-id> So for the URL https://www.motifinvesting.com/blog/cleantech-obama-romney/1494 I am getting the attached results when I Fetch as Google. When I access the same URL in my browser, I see a 200 status code and no redirect. Why would Google Bot show that the URL is being redirected? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | motif_marketing
Breanna https://www.motifinvesting.com/blog/cleantech-obama-romney/1494 I7yQPza.png0 -
Potential Pagination Issue/ Duplicate content issue
Hi All, We upgraded our framework , relaunched our site with new url structures etc and re did our site map to Google last week. However, it's now come to light that the rel=next, rel=Prev tags we had in place on many of our pages are missing. We are putting them back in now but my worry is , as they were previously missing when we submitted the , will I have duplicate content issues or will it resolve itself , as Google re-crawls the site over time ?.. Any advice would be greatly appreciated? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
What is the best way to hide duplicate, image embedded links from search engines?
**Hello! Hoping to get the community’s advice on a technical SEO challenge we are currently facing. [My apologies in advance for the long-ish post. I tried my best to condense the issue, but it is complicated and I wanted to make sure I also provided enough detail.] Context: I manage a human anatomy educational website that helps students learn about the various parts of the human body. We have been around for a while now, and recently launched a completely new version of our site using 3D CAD images. While we tried our best to design our new site with SEO best practices in mind, our daily visitors dropped by ~15%, despite drastic improvements we saw in our user interaction metrics, soon after we flipped the switch. SEOMoz’s Website Crawler helped us uncover that we now may have too many links on our pages and that this could be at least part of the reason behind the lower traffic. i.e. we are not making optimal use of links and are potentially ‘leaking’ link juice now. Since students learn about human anatomy in different ways, most of our anatomy pages contain two sets of links: Clickable links embedded via JavaScript in our images. This allows users to explore parts of the body by clicking on whatever objects interests them. For example, if you are viewing a page on muscles of the arm and hand and you want to zoom in on the biceps, you can click on the biceps and go to our detailed biceps page. Anatomy Terms lists (to the left of the image) that list all the different parts of the body on the image. This is for users who might not know where on the arms the biceps actually are. But this user could then simply click on the term “Biceps” and get to our biceps page that way. Since many sections of the body have hundreds of smaller parts, this means many of our pages have 150 links or more each. And to make matters worse, in most cases, the links in the images and in the terms lists go to the exact same page. My Question: Is there any way we could hide one set of links (preferably the anchor text-less image based links) from search engines, such that only one set of links would be visible? I have read conflicting accounts of different methods from using JavaScript to embedding links into HTML5 tags. And we definitely do not want to do anything that could be considered black hat. Thanks in advance for your thoughts! Eric**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R0 -
Is this duplicate content?
My client has several articles and pages that have 2 different URLs For example: /bc-blazes-construction-trail is the same article as: /article.cfm?intDocID=22572 I was not sure if this was duplicate content or not ... Or if I should be putting "/article.cfm" into the robots.txt file or not.. if anyone could help me out, that would be awesome! Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560