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.
Redirect to http to https - Pros and Cons
-
Hi,
I know its best practice to redirect a website from http to https, instead of having many entry point to your website. When a website has been running for a long time on http and https, what are the SEO Pros and Cons of implementing a redirect from Http to Https?
-
Do you know how long it takes Google to drop pages from Google's index/cache?
-
(1) no, if you link to an insecure page it counts against you. Since a user or search engine would have to load and visit the insecure content to find the canonical (as that's where it would be), it does not mitigate this. You'll just have to hope it doesn't end up happening too much. Canonical tags only stop content duplication, they have no impact on SEO authority merging or insecure links
(2) If the HTTPS URLs are pretty much exactly the same as their HTTP counterparts and you 301 HTTP to HTTPS, the SEO authority should flow across to HTTPS instead. Canonical tags are not proven to do what 301s do, so you may end up in a mess with those. Most sites experience a slight dip moving from HTTP to HTTPS via proper 301s, however it's not large and doesn't last long if the 301s were done well. Staying on HTTP in the long term, you will lose a lot of rankings (gradually, over time). Since you will be constantly losing, it puts your site's progress 'on hold', so the small dip from moving from HTTP to HTTPS is the 'lesser of two evils' (IMO)
(3) Both. It will reduce the number of times Google crawls HTTP, but only after pages on HTTP are dropped from Google's index / recent cache
-
Thanks for the answer. However, have two more questions: (1) Will implementing canonical tags limit the temporary disruption and (2) If backlinks are pointing to http will these be lost or transferred, i.e. will https pages have less equity or inherit equity of the http pages. Finally, will redirecting to https reduce the number of times Google crawls your site or will google still crawl http until all http pages in the Google cache are removed?
-
Or in NginX format which is usually faster
-
There are no cons that I can think of, a simple script in a sites htaccess file is the best was to implement the redirection.
-
The idea of HTTPS has always been a good one, and most leading businesses implemented it a long time ago.
However, somewhat recently, Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking factor.
Obviously, that got SEOs talking about and debating the subject.
At the time, it was a very small ranking factor, affecting less than 1% of global searches. Even now, it’s not a big factor.
However, security is something that Google takes very seriously, and it’s likely to become more important in the future.
Some SEOs jumped right on it and made the switch.
-
This is a very solid answer. One additional point is that without a forced structure, Google can 'catch out' your secure site linking to your insecure site. Say you have a blog and a post in the blog links to one of your pages, that link is probably created as 'absolute' in your CMS. So suddenly, when you load that blog post on HTTPS, you can see a link pointing to HTTP. Google doesn't like links pointing to insecure content, so over time the situation snowballs and you lose a lot of trust
-
If your current pages can be accessed by http and by https, and if you don't have canonicals or redirects pointing everything to one version or the other, then one very significant "con" for that approach is that you are splitting your link equity. So, if the http page has 50 inbound links, and the https has another 50, you would do better to have one page with 100 inbound links.
Another difference is how browsers show/warn about non-secure pages. As well as any ranking factor they may associate with secure. Again, in favor of redirecting http to https. The visual handling can also impact conversion rates and bounce rates, which can in turn impact ranking.
As far as cons to redirecting, one would be that you might expect a temporary disruption to rankings. There will likely be a bit of a dip, short term. Another is that you will need to remove and then be careful about accidentally adding any non-secure resources (like images) on the https pages, which will then issue a warning to visitors as well as possibly impacting ranks. There is some consensus that redirects (and canonical links) do leak a very small amount of link equity for each hop they take. So, that's another "con". But my recent experiences doing this with two sites have been that after the temporary "dip" of a couple of months, if done properly, the "pros" outweigh the "cons".
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
-
GoogleBot still crawling HTTP/1.1 years after website moved to HTTP/2
Whole website moved to https://www. HTTP/2 version 3 years ago. When we review log files, it is clear that - for the home page - GoogleBot continues to only access via HTTP/1.1 protocol Robots file is correct (simply allowing all and referring to https://www. sitemap Sitemap is referencing https://www. pages including homepage Hosting provider has confirmed server is correctly configured to support HTTP/2 and provided evidence of accessing via HTTP/2 working 301 redirects set up for non-secure and non-www versions of website all to https://www. version Not using a CDN or proxy GSC reports home page as correctly indexed (with https://www. version canonicalised) but does still have the non-secure version of website as the referring page in the Discovery section. GSC also reports homepage as being crawled every day or so. Totally understand it can take time to update index, but we are at a complete loss to understand why GoogleBot continues to only go through HTTP/1.1 version not 2 Possibly related issue - and of course what is causing concern - is that new pages of site seem to index and perform well in SERP ... except home page. This never makes it to page 1 (other than for brand name) despite rating multiples higher in terms of content, speed etc than other pages which still get indexed in preference to home page. Any thoughts, further tests, ideas, direction or anything will be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | AKCAC1 -
Redirecting an Entire Website?
Is it best to redirect an old website to a new website page by page to like pages or just the entire site all at once to the home page of the new site? I do have about 10 good pages on the site that are worth directing to corresponding pages on the new site. Just trying to figure out what is going to preserve the most link juice. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | photoseo10 -
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
How to change 302 redirect from http to https
Hi gang. Our site currently has a 302 redirect from the HTTP version of the homepage to the HTTPS version of the homepage. I understand this really should be changed to a 301 redirect but I'm having a little trouble figuring out exactly how this should be done. Some places on the internet are telling me I can edit our htaccess file to specify the type of redirect, however our htaccess file seems to be missing some of the information in theirs. Can anyone tell me what needs to be changed in the htaccess file - or if there's a simpler way to change the 302 to a 301? Many thanks 🙂 htaccess: BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] END WordPress EXPIRES CACHING ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 6 months" ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days" EXPIRES CACHING
Technical SEO | | davedon0 -
301 redirects delay in picking up
Hi I have been involved in the redesign/development of a website which has up until now had a lot of international traffic. On day of migration I uploaded all the 301 redirects to the website (wordpress) using Simple 301 redirect plugin. I tested a number of them and they appeared to be working. I also submitted the new sitemaps to Search Console. Since migration international traffic - particularly from countries such as india, Phillipines, Sri Lanka etc have significantly dropped off whereas the local traffic and some of the international traffic such as USA has remained fairly consistent. Looking at Analytics and entrances recently it appears as though search results are/were showing a number of pages with 404's (one in particular which received significant traffic and for which I had created a 301 redirection) - I have checked this page using the old url and it re-directs correctly for me and today asked a colleague in India to also check - he is getting the redirection fine. Does Google.in take a significantly longer time to pick these up in search results? Or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Clicksjim1 -
How do I fix a 301 Redirect Loop?
Saturday I waas doing some correcting of some duplicate titles, including nofollowing tags, etc. (my main problem was duplicate titles due to tags and categories being indexed). Now this morning I see that one of my pages refuses to load, citing a 301 redirect loop. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/feeding/switching-baby-formula/ Originally, the page was posted under the wrong category. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/uncategorized/switching-baby-formula I resaved it under the correct category (feeding) and now it won't load. Can someone help me figure out how to correct this mess? Thanks so much Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
How long should I keep 301 redirects?
I have modified a the URL structure of a whole section of a website and used mod_rewrite 301 redirect to match the new structure. Now that was around 3 months ago and I was wondering how long should I keep this redirect for? As it is a new website I am quite sure that there are no links around with the old URL structure but still I can see the google bot trying from time to time to access the old URL structure. Shouldn't the google bot learn from this 301 redirect and not go anymore for the old URL?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards0