Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
When should you 410 pages instead of 404
Hi All, We have approx 6,000 - 404 pages. These are for categories etc we don't do anymore and there is not near replacement etc so basically no reason or benefit to have them at all. I can see in GWT , these are still being crawled/found and therefore taking up crawler bandwidth. Our SEO agency said we should 410 these pages?.. I am wondering what the difference is and how google treats them differently ?. Do anyone know When should you 410 pages instead of 404 ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0