Force SSL. Good or Bad?
-
My website can be accessed with a number of different URL's and I am trying to consolidate the traffic to one point. Is there any problem, SEO or technical, with forcing all users who come to my site to going to our https domain? I have already set a preferred domain in WebMaster Tools and set rel=canonical for each page. For instance, anyone entering the below sites would be forced to land at https://www.1099pro.com.
-
Michael -
I don't see any major SEO issues with forcing an SSL session, other than:
-
SSL is usually a bit slower, due to the encryption overhead. You might want to benchmark this to make sure it's not affecting your site load speed times. If things are slow, more hardware and caching might help.
-
Make sure that all of your content is being served from secure links. For example, if you are displaying a graphic on the home page of the site, use relative paths (../images/super-impressive-graphic.png). If you have content that uses absolute links, such as: (img src="http://www.1099pro.com/images/super-impressive-graphic.png), this will throw an SSL warning and tell users that the site is not secure. This is important with CSS, as well as Facebook, Twitter and other plugins.
Looking at the site, it looks like your Google and LiveZilla tracking codes are set properly to auto-switch to https, but I'd try to test this.
- Also, if you're changing the URLs, you'll want to make sure that older pages with the non-www are 301 redirected to the secure pages properly, too.
Hope this helps!
Thanks,
- Jeff
-
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
-
Mergers & Acquisitions - Website Transition Good practice
Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone has come across good practice for maintaining websites after a merger or acquisition where there needs to be an association between two websites of the two companies involved. For an acquisition, I'm considering moving the acquired company to a sub domain of the parent company e.g. aquiredcompany.parentcompany.com. On both websites there wmay be a prominant popup so visitors can switch between the websites if they have visited the incorrect one. One worry I have is the acquired company has some good rankings, which I want to keep. I will of course manage the process through 301 redirects. But I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this approach or can suggest any better solutions. Thanks in advance, Stuart
Web Design | | Stuart260 -
Footer links on my site... bad for passing page rank?
i've been told that it is possible that google discounts the weight or page rank passed in footer links of websites and my website has the navigation to many of my pages in the footer of each page. My whole website is about 20 pages so each page has links to the 5 most popular pages at the top and the rest of the links are in the footer of each page. Am i losing page rank by having these links in the footer? Should i make my navigation different? I have lots of articles on my site so i thought it might be not only helpful to my readers but give my pages an seo boost if i placed in context links in the body of my articles to other pages of my site. Does this sound like a good idea? Thanks mozzers! Thanks mozzers!
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Is this a good WP template for this site?
I need some advice, please. My cousin wants to take his site; http://www.gaport.com/ and move it to this wordpress theme http://themeforest.net/item/elvyre-retina-ready-html5-template/6639095. I have two reservations about this, but before I say anything I'd like the community's feedback, please. 1. It's a brand new theme. It's not even out for two weeks. That strikes me as a giant red flag. ** Just to clarify, i's not a new theme; it's new for WP. 2. It only costs $15. I can't tell what's wrong with this theme, but "you get what you paid for" is a cliche for a reason, and that price seems way too low for something quality. Are these legitimate concerns? Do you all have any recommendations for a theme that might suit him better? I'd appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Are Carousels Bad for SEO?
My real estate web site was migrated form Drupal to Wordpress last July. The ranking have dropped a lot since migration. One of the things we changed is that we have added two carousels to the home page. Most of the text is below the carousels. Is this bad for SEO? Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
Does my font look good in this?
Apologies for the title, but a serious point here.... We (like a lot of people) spend time on almost mechanical on-page optimisation. However, we are finally moving our thinking to our visitors and what works for them - not the search engines. I know, about time. With that in mind we have de-cluttered our content pages and increased font sizes - focussing on usability more. This is an example of a tweaked page - http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/free-legal-information/employment-law/exceptions-for-unfair-dismissal.html This is an un-tweaked page - http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/agency-agreement.html Which do you prefer to read/look at??
Web Design | | dexm100 -
Does having a Blog link in the top level navigation provide any better SEO value, or would having it in a footer or top navigation work just as good?
Trying to decide on whether placing a link to the blog in our top level navigation would have a better SEO value than just placing it in top or footer navigation. I have an ecommerce site.
Web Design | | RPD0 -
Can anyone recommend me a good wordpress website designer for local services website?
Hi all,
Web Design | | chanel27
Does anyone know of any good wordpress SEO designer? I am looking to build some sites on:
Aircon Services
Laundry Services
Carpet Cleaning etc The wordpress must be able to easily add articles from time to time like this HTML site:
http://www.airconservices.com.sg/articles.html Appreciate you help!0 -
Can someone suggest a good wordpress plugin for compressing images?
I am building a new website and it has 500+ photo images. I've got less than 100 in there at the moment and the page speed is already very slow. I'm trying to reduce the size of the images before uploading but without a photoshop application it is very difficult. Are there any great plugins for wordpress that can help?
Web Design | | skehoe0