Few pages without SSL
-
Hi,
A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured.A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work.
It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection.
Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking?Regards,
Tom -
It may potentially affect the rankings on:
-
pages without SSL
-
pages linking to pages without SSL
At first, not drastically - but you'll find that you'll get more and more behind until you had wished you just embraced HTTPS.
The exception to this of course, is if no one who is competing over the same keywords, is fully embracing SSL. If the majority of the query-space's ranking sites are insecure, even though Google frowns upon that - there's not much they can do (they can't just rank no one!)
So you need to do some legwork. See if your competitors suffer from the same issue. If they all do, maybe don't be so concerned at this point. If they're all showing signs of fully moving over to HTTPS, be more worried
-
-
Just to be sure, i would secure every page with an SLL certificate. When Google finds out that not every page is secure, this it may raise some eyebrows and even effect the whole site.
-
Yes that can hurt Google rankings. Insecure pages tend to rank less well and over time, that trend is only set to increase (with Google becoming less and less accepting of insecure pages, eventually they will probably be labelled a 'bad neighborhood' like gambling and porn sites). Additionally, URLs which link out to insecure pages (which are not on HTTPS) can also see adverse ranking effects (as Google knows that those pages are likely to direct users to insecure areas of the web)
At the moment, you can probably get by with some concessions. Those concessions would be, accepting that the insecure URLs probably won't rank very well compared with pages offering the same entertainment / functionality, which have fully embraced secure browsing (which are on HTTPS, which are still responsive, which don't link to insecure addresses)
If you're confident that the functionality you are offering, fundamentally can't be offered through HTTPS - then that may be only a minor concern (as all your competitors are bound by the same restrictions). If you're wrong, though - you're gonna have a bad time. Being 'wrong' now, may be more appealing than being 'dead wrong' later
Google will not remove the warnings your pages have, unless you play ball. If you think that won't bother your users, or that your competition is fundamentally incapable of a better, more secure integration - fair enough. Google is set to take more and more action on this over time
P.S: if your main, ranking pages are secure and if they don't directly link to this small subset of insecure pages, then you'll probably be ok (at least in the short term)
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
-
Specific page does not index
Hi, First question: Working on the indexation of all pages for a specific client, there's one page that refuses to index. Google Search console says there's a robots.txt file, but I can't seem to find any tracks of that in the backend, nor in the code itself. Could someone reach out to me and tell me why this is happening? The page: https://www.brody.be/nl/assistentiewoningen/ Second question: Google is showing another meta description than the one our client gave in in Yoast Premium snippet. Could it be there's another plugin overwriting this description? Or do we have to wait for it to change after a specific period of time? Hope you guys can help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversal0 -
How would you handle these pages? Should they be indexed?
If a site has about 100 pages offering specific discounts for employees at various companies, for example... mysite.com/discounts/target mysite.com/discounts/kohls mysite.com/discounts/jcpenney and all these pages are nearly 100% duplicates, how would you handle them? My recommendation to my client was to use noindex, follow. These pages tend to receive backlinks from the actual companies receiving the discounts, so obviously they are valuable from a linking standpoint. But say the content is nearly identical between each page; should they be indexed? Is there any value for someone at Kohl's, for example, to be able to find this landing page in the search results? Here is a live example of what I am talking about: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&safe=active&rlz=1C1WPZB_enUS735US735&q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fpoi8.petinsurance.com%2Fbenefits%2F&oq=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fpoi8.petinsurance.com%2Fbenefits%2F&gs_l=serp.3...7812.8453.0.8643.6.6.0.0.0.0.174.646.3j3.6.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..0.5.586...0j35i39k1j0i131k1j0i67k1j0i131i67k1j0i131i46k1j46i131k1j0i20k1j0i10i3k1.RyIhsU0Yz4E
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Google is indexing wrong page for search terms not on that page
I’m having a problem … the wrong page is indexing with Google, for search phrases “not on that page”. Explained … On a website I developed, I have four products. For example sake, we’ll say these four products are: Sneakers (search phrase: sneakers) Boots (search phrase: boots) Sandals (search phrase: sandals) High heels (search phrase: high heels) Error: What is going “wrong” is … When the search phrase “high heels” is indexed by Google, my “Sneakers” page is being indexed instead (and ranking very well, like #2). The page that SHOULD be indexing, is the “High heels” page (not the sneakers page – this is the wrong search phrase, and it’s not even on that product page – not in URL, not in H1 tags, not in title, not in page text – nowhere, except for in the top navigation link). Clue #1 … this same error is ALSO happening for my other search phrases, in exactly the same manner. i.e. … the search phrase “sandals” is ALSO resulting in my “Sneakers” page being indexed, by Google. Clue #2 … this error is NOT happening with Bing (the proper pages are correctly indexing with the proper search phrases, in Bing). Note 1: MOZ has given all my product pages an “A” ranking, for optimization. Note 2: This is a WordPress website. Note 3: I had recently migrated (3 months ago) most of this new website’s page content (but not the “Sneakers” page – this page is new) from an old, existing website (not mine), which had been indexing OK for these search phrases. Note 4: 301 redirects were used, for all of the OLD website pages, to the new website. I have tried everything I can think of to fix this, over a period of more than 30 days. Nothing has worked. I think the “clues” (it indexes properly in Bing) are useful, but I need help. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MG_Lomb_SEO0 -
Why is my page not showing in Google results
Hi, My website chka.org is showing up in Google but this page is not : http://www.chka.org/kickboxing-classes-nyc/ I cannot figure it out why. I submitted in manually to be crawled and it showed up for a day or two and then it disappeared again. The website is not copy pasted, it has unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leokadiarapczynska0 -
Show parts of page A on page B & C?
Good afternoon,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
A quick question. I am working on a website which has a large page with different sections. Lets say: Page 1
SECTION A
SECTION B
SECTION C Now, they are adding a new area where they want to show only certain sections, so it would look like this: Page 2
SECTION A Page 3
SECTION C Page 4
SECTION D So my question is, would a rel='canonical' tag back to Page 1 be the correct way of preempting any duplicate content issues? I do not need Page 2-4 to even be indexed, it is just a matter of usability and giving the users what they are looking for without all the rest of the extra stuff. Gracias. Tesekürler. Salamat Ko. Thanks. (bonus thumbs up for anybody who knows which languages each of those are) 🙂0 -
Orphan My Home Page
I want to orphan a home page on a site that I own so that the start page becomes site.com/home (or whatever) as opposed to site.com/. I need to accomplish this without associating the former with the latter...meaning no 301. Since this will not be a temporary move, 302 does not seem to work either. And even if I could use it, I don't want to credit / with anything from /home. Is there any way to default the Apache handler to /home without rewriting the URL? Or is there any other solution? The bottom line is, at the end of the day, I need Google to forget about / and anything associated with it, without interrupting the user experience when they request /. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NTGproducts0 -
Incorrect cached page indexing in Google while correct page indexes intermittently
Hi, we are a South African insurance company. We have a page http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle which has a 301 redirect to http://www.miway.co.za/car-insurance. Problem is that the former page is ranking in the index rather than the latter. The latter page does index occasionally in the same position, but rarely. This is primarily for search phrases like "car insurance" and "car insurance quotes". The ranking was knocked down the index with Penquin 2.0. It was not ranking at all but we have managed to recover to 12/13. This abnormally has only been occurring since the recovery. The correct page does index for other search terms like "insurance for car". Your help would be appreciated, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | miway0 -
Page titles
Hi Guys, Hope your all well and business is good. I have been going through and changing page titles for my site which is currently huge attracting massive amounts of traffic. However from my pro membership i have notice a lot of the rankings in Google search engine has decreased. I have been using a strategy that i read on SEOMoz which is; example Keyword | Page heading | company name Is this why? if so what is the best method? I have changed nothing else so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850