Forced Redirects/HTTP<>HTTPS 301 Question
-
Hi All,
Sorry for what's about to be a long-ish question, but tl;dr:
-
Has anyone else had experience with a 301 redirect at the server level between HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site in order to maintain accurate social media share counts? This is new to me and I'm wondering how common it is.
-
I'm having issues with this forced redirect between HTTP/HTTPS as outlined below and am struggling to find any information that will help me to troubleshoot this or better understand the situation. If anyone has any recommendations for things to try or sources to read up on, I'd appreciate it. I'm especially concerned about any issues that this may be causing at the SEO level and the known-unknowns.
A magazine I work for recently relaunched after switching platforms from Atavist to Newspack (which is run via WordPress). Since then, we've been having some issues with 301s, but they relate to new stories that are native to our new platform/CMS and have had zero URL changes. We've always used HTTPS.
Basically, the preview for any post we make linking to the new site, including these new (non-migrated pages) on Facebook previews as a 301 in the title and with no image. This also overrides the social media metadata we set through Yoast Premium.
I ran some of the links through the Facebook debugger and it appears that Facebook is reading these links to our site (using https) as redirects to http that then redirect to https. I was told by our tech support person on Newspack's team that this is intentional, so that Facebook will maintain accurate share counts versus separate share counts for http/https, however this forced redirect seems to be failing if we can't post our links with any metadata. (The only way to reliably fix is by adding a query parameter to each URL which, obviously, still gives us inaccurate share counts.)
This is the first time I've encountered this intentional redirect thing and I've asked a few times for more information about how it's set up just for my own edification, but all I can get is that it’s something managed at the server level and is designed to prevent separate share counts for HTTP and HTTPS.
Has anyone encountered this method before, and can anyone either explain it to me or point me in the direction of a resource where I can learn more about how it's configured as well as the pros and cons? I'm especially concerned about our SEO with this and how this may impact the way search engines read our site. So far, nothing's come up on scans, but I'd like to stay one step ahead of this.
Thanks in advance!
-
-
This is long time question. And answer is as fast you forget about that "count" the seamless migration will be.
Because many people was stopped migration awaiting an miracle about moving their counts to HTTPS version. And years was passed - and no solution for that.
Forcing HTTPS -> HTTP -> HTTPS is risky because sooner or later something can be changed and crawling issues can happens. Also maintain both sites for HTTP/HTTPS infrastructure can have some effect on your bills.
You need to simplify it by providing only one - HTTPS version.
Peter
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
-
URL structuring / redirect question
Hi there, I have a URL structuring / redirect question. I have many pages on my site but I set each page up to fall under one of two folders as I serve two unique markets and want each side to be indexed properly. I have SIDE A: www.domain/FOLDER-A.com and SIDE B: www.domain/FOLDER-B. The problem is that I have a page for www.domain.com and www.domain/FOLDER-A/page1.com but I do NOT have a page for www.domain/FOLDER-A. The reason for this is that I've opted to make what would be www.domain/FOLDER-A be www.domain.com and act the primary landing page the site. As a result, there is no page located at www.domain/FOLDER-A. My WordPress template (Divi by Elegant Themes) forced me to create a blank page to be able to build off the FOLDER-A framework. My question is that given I am forced to have this blank page, do I leave it be or create a 302 or 307 redirect to www.domain.com? I fear using a 301 redirect given I may want to utilize this page for content at some point in the future. This isn't the easiest post to follow so please let me know if I need to restate the question. Many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | KurtWSEO0 -
Switching site from http to https. Should I do entire site?
Good morning, As many of you have read, Google seems to have confirmed that they will give a small boost to sites with SSL certificates this morning. So my question is, does that mean we have to switch our entire site to https? Even simple information pages and blog posts? Or will we get credit for the https boost as long as the sensitive parts of our site have it? Anybody know? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft1 -
Sharing/hosting of content questions...
I just wanted to get opinion on some of the fundamentals and semantics of optimisation and content generation/distribution - your thoughts and opinions are welcome. OK, for example, lets assume (for illustration purposes) that I have a site - www.examplegolfer.com aimed at golfers with golf related content. The keywords I would like to optimise for are: golf balls golf tees lowering your golf handicap drive a golf ball further Now, I'm going to be creating informative, useful content (infographics, articles, how to guides, video demonstrations etc) centred around these topics/keywords, which hopefully our audience/prospects will find useful and bookmark, share and monition our site/brand on the web, increasing (over time) our position of these terms/keywords in the SERP's. Now, once I've researched and created my content piece, where should I place it? Let's assume it's an infographic - should this be hosted on an infographic sharing site (such as Visually) or on my site, or both? If it's hosted or embedded on my site, should this be in a blog or on the page I'm optimising for (and I've generated my keyword around)? For example, if my infographic is around golf balls, should this be embedded on the page www.examplegolfer.com/golf-balls (the page I'm trying to optimise) and if so, and it's also placed elsewhere around the internet (i.e on Visually for example), this could technically be seen as duplicated content as the infographic is on my site and on Visually (for example)? How does everyone else share/distribute/host their created content in various locations whilst avoiding the duplicated content issue? Or have I missed something? Also, how important is it to include my keyword (golf balls) in the pieces' title or anchor text? Or indeed within the piece itself? One final question - should the content by authoured/shared as the brand/company or an individual (spokesperson if you like) on behalf of the company (i.e. John Smith)? I'm all for creating great, interesting, useful content for my audience, however I want to ensure we're getting the most out of it as researching influencers, researching the piece and creating it and distributing it isn't a quick or easy job (as we all know!). Thoughts and comments welcome. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Carl2870 -
Switching forum software - 301 redirects?
Hi everyone I'm working on a successful Wordpress site that also has a forum attached. The forum currently uses YAF forum software, which requires Windows hosting. The site owner wants to switch to Linux hosting. This is not a problem for WP, but it does mean that we'll need to transfer the forum to Xenforo or something similar that runs on Linux. We're OK with the technical side of this, but we're worried about the SEO implications. The URL for every forum post (more than 50,000 of them) is going to change during this transfer. It seems completely impractical to 301 each of those, so should I just 301 the URLs that have inbound links? Also, what is google's algo going to think when we suddenly have ~50,000 404s? Many thanks in advance! J
Technical SEO | | van280 -
Rebranding / Redirecting
Hi I have a client who wants to re-brand their shopify clothing store under new domain name. Whilst still a clothing store its going to have different department structure and product pages and will hence be a different store/site. Is there anyway to pass any of the history/authority of existing site to the new one such as 301 redirecting the top level pages of existing site to nearest equivalent pages of new site etc or best to just redirect the old site domain to the new ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
/forum/ or /hookah-forum/
I'm building a new website on Hookah.org. It will have a forum and blog. Should I put them in Hookah.org/hookah-forum/ and Hookah.com/hookah-blog/ or Hookah.org/forum and Hookah.org/blog I think /forum/ and /blog/ are easier for users but am not sure how much adding the word hookah helps with SEO.
Technical SEO | | Heydarian0 -
Not sure which URL to use for 301 redirect
A client has new website design completed by another developer, was launched in April of this year. No 301 redirect was set up so duplicate content is an issue. Client has had a website with same domain name for about 10 years, but has not had any SEO work completed before or since his new site design. For non-www there are 6 referring links - 1 considered to have authority, for www there are also 6 but 3 considered to have authority. More links seem to coming from www than non-www. But for one of the clients keywords they are ranked #1 for their area and that links to their non-www address. And even though no redirects set up by developer, non-www has had far more visits according to Google Analytics. So many basics that still need to be done for site: no meta-descriptions on any page, H1 and page titles could use keywords, call to action moved above fold, etc. Considering this is a new site, and new SEO work and many more inbound links needed, does it matter which address I redirect to? _Cindy Barnard
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0 -
Minisites - 301 Redirect or Links to Main site
Not sure whether this is considered black hat or not but I know it is done and I would like to know which is the most effectrive method. If you were to acquire multiple sites in the same niche to your main site (either by buying existing sites or perhaps registering expired domains) which already had strong aged backlinks, is it better to either: a) 301 the new domain to the main site (or a subpage perhaps) b) create 'minisites' on the new domains (trying to mirror the URL structure of the previous incarnation if possible to scoop up and remaining inbound backlink juice, on seperate IPs to the main site as well) and then place several links to the main site & subpages. Would the decay of link juice through 301's mean you lose benefit that way or is it the same as a normal link? Would the 301 method mean any IBL's into URL's other than the homepage be lost? The homepage of the minisite will likely have 4 or 5 internal links so will this dilure the effect of the links to the main site? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | OzDave0