Does using non-https links (not pages) impact or penalise the website rankings?
-
Hi community,
We have couple of pages where we we have given non-https (http) hyperlinks by mistake. They will redirect to http links anyway. Does using these http links on page hurt any rankings?
Thansk
-
You won't be making the most of your SEO authority by firing it through redirects. A to B is always better than putting 301s in the middle of links. It's also bad UX because, you send the user to too many locations which is inefficient and a waste of their time.
I wouldn't expect something like this to make much difference overall, but if you were going to 'do it right' you would just fix it. It's also not good to have too many links pointing to 'insecure' addresses, even if they will later be intercepted. I would just go in and fix the problem.
In SEO, very few things make much difference at all (if there was one thing that made the most difference, everyone would just focus on that). Instead it's about pride, balance and stopping snowballs from forming before they start to roll. If you ignore this one, you'll also ignore all related issues and over time you could notice a performance hit (for poor link structure, lower site health, linking to insecure content, wasting user's time with redirects / bad UX).
Instead of sitting back and waiting for bad things to happen, nip it in the bud. It only takes five minutes and then your mind can be at rest
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
-
What happens when we delete all the outgoing links from a forum at once?
Hi all, We have our forum and is filled with spammy content and external nofollow links. I am just wondering if we can make all these links as plain text from hyperlinks (if we can); it's technically deleting all the external links. Will this impact negatively or positively anyhow as per Google? Please share your ideas. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Link Removal
Hi - We have been trying to remove bad links for about 12 months. QUESTION: How can be eliminate backlinks from sites are not possible to contact? Background: Contacted as many domain administrators as we could. Not a big change. Some want $$$ Submitted 3 disavow lists (3 months apart from each other). Last list was to remove all links. We still have a large number of Japanese and Chines links directories pointing to us that we cannot contact or don't know how to ask to be removal. One key thing to keep in mind, is that we don't want to change the URL. Thanks, for the help.
Algorithm Updates | | highlandadventures0 -
Website Rankings Dropped April 12
A client website dropped drastically on April 12. Outside of some branded keywords, search results dropped off of the first page and are buried on page 3+ at best. Nothing has changed on the site, and there were no problems with the link profile. GWT has no manual actions. Kind of at a loss. Does anyone know if there was an algorithm update or anything external that may be causing some problems here? Site is www.averybiomedical.com if you want to take a look, but I'm just curious if there was anything I should be aware of. Thanks for the help!
Algorithm Updates | | AdamWormann0 -
Responsive websites rank better?
In the upcoming months, or even now, do you think responsive websites will rank higher?
Algorithm Updates | | CFSSEO0 -
Number of Items As a Google Ranking Factor??
If I search for "hiking boots" and scan down the SERPs I see the following... Google reports "483 items" for the Zappos.com page. Google reports "Results 1 - 36 of 85" for the Shoebuy.com page (and that does not appear in their code). So, Google is obviously paying attention to the depth of your information or the number of items that you are showing. If they think that is important enough to count and report in the SERPs, might they also be using that information as a ranking factor?? PRACTICAL APPLICATION FOR SEO: If google is using this information, perhaps people should list all of their color, size, etc variants on a single page. For example if you sell widgets in five colors, instead of making one page for each color, list all five on the same page.
Algorithm Updates | | EGOL1 -
When to remove bad links.
Hi everyone. We were hit on the 5th Oct with manual penalties - after building some good links and building good content we saw some gains in our SERPS, not to where they were, but they are definately improving for some low competition keywords. In this case would people recommend still trying to remove bad links? We have audited our links and identified ones which seem spammy. We were going to go through a step by step process, emailing bad link providers where possible, and then sending a disavow for any links we were not able to remove. If we have started to see gains through other means is it wise in people's opinion to start contacting google? We watched Matt Cutts video on disavow usage and he states not to use it unless in extreme situations, so we don't want to 'wake the beast'. Many thanks. James.
Algorithm Updates | | Quime0 -
Half my ranks have gone missing
I have a site that was rankly very highly for gaming walkthrough phrases. I was ranking #3 for the phrase skyward sword walkthrough Then it began to drop, despite me building more links (non spammy links) through guest blogs and emailing people requesting they just link to it from their site. I went in and added more text to the page and it went up a few places but is now gone from the first 5-10 pages. This has also happened to all of my walkthrough related ranks. My other ranks are still there but these accounted for a large portion of my traffic and is very odd. My on-page grade is near if not perfect my page Some insight would be nice
Algorithm Updates | | webfeatseo0 -
Should I use canonical tags on my site?
I'm trying to keep this a generic example, so apologies if this is too vague. On my main website, we've always had a duplicate content issue. The main focus of our site is breaking down to specific, brick and mortar locations. We have to duplicate the description of product/service for every geographic location (this is a legal requirement). So for example, you might have the parent "product/service" page targeting the term, and then 100's of sub pages with "product/service San Francisco", "product/service Austin", etc. These pages have identical content except for the geographic location is dynamically swapped out. There is also additional useful content like google map of area, local resources, etc. As I said this was always seen as an SEO issue, specifically you could see in the way that googlebot would crawl pages and how pagerank flowed through the site that having 100's of pages with identical copy and just swapping out the geographic location wasn't seen as good content, however we still always received traffic and conversions for the long tail geographic terms so we left it. Las year, with Panda, we noticed a drop in traffic and thought it was due to this duplicate issue so I added canonical tags to all our geographic specific product/service pages that pointed back to the parent page, that seemed to be received well by google and traffic was back to normal in short order. However, recently what I notice a LOT in our SERP pages is if I type in a geographic specific term, i.e. "product/service san francisco", our deep page with the canonical tag is what google is ranking. Google inserts its own title tag on the SERP page and leaves the description blank as it doesn't index the page due to the canonical tag on the page. Essentially what I think it is rewarding is the site architecture which organizes the content to the specific geo in the URL: site.com/service/location/san-francisco. Other than that there is no reason for it to rank that page. Sorry if this is lengthy, thanks for reading all of that! Essentially my question is, should I keep the canonical tags on the site or take them off since Google insists on ranking the page? If I am ranking already then the potential upside to doing that is ranking higher (we're usually in the 3-6 spot on the result page) and also higher CTR because we can get a description back on our resulting page. The counter argument is I'm already ranking so leave it and focus on other things. Appreciate your thoughts on this!
Algorithm Updates | | edu-SEO0