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
-
Recently migrated to https version of volusion site. 301 redirect link chain question
I recently migrated to a https version of a volusion site. They have some type of internal 301 redirect method to accommodate for the entire site. I have also used the 301 redirect manager to redirect categories and pages which I have changed. The question is if I have changed a page internally in the redirect manager from say source. /bluewidget to say. target. /superbluewidget is it wiser or even possible to do it this way to reduce the redirect chain from 3 to 2 steps source. /bluewidget to. target https://www.example/superbluewidget can a relative link be targeted to a full url to reduce steps in a 301 redirect link chain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mrkingsley0 -
Redirecting a blog
We've acquired another company and want to redirect their soon-to-be-obsolete website to ours. It includes a blog with many blog posts. Should we: only 301 redirect the top level blog URL
Technical SEO | | Caro-O
try redirect individual blogs to blogs of a similar topic on our site (least practical I'm sure)
redirect all their individual posts to our main blog URL Thanks, Caro1 -
Using http: shorthand inside canonical tag ("//" instead of "http:") can cause harm?
HI, I am planning to launch a new site, and shortly after to move to HTTPS. to save the need to change over 5,000 canonical tags in pages the webmaster suggested we implement inside the rel canonical "//" instead of the absolute path, would that do any damage or be a problem? oranges-south-dakota" />
Technical SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda0 -
Is an international redirect hurting my ranking
We're a small international company that redirects users based on their language identifier.
Technical SEO | | _entreprenerd
I've now taken a big interest in and also how it affects ranking. When I look at my MOZ dashboard the fundedbyme.com domain has a higher ranking than fundedbyme.com/en/ for example. Our company wants to target other markets such as Spain and Germany, I am imposing penalties on myself by not having rel="canonical" in place and redirecting to the TLD?0 -
Redirecting non-www to www
Hi all, I recently ran my first diagnostic test with SEOmoz and was alarmed to find my company's site has over 8,000 cases of duplicate content, virtually all of which can be attributed to separate domains, www vs. non-www. So after some research I found that this can be solved easily using .htaccess. However I found a warning on another site that if my site has already been indexed by Google without the www, there could be side effects like a loss in PR. Can anybody tell me how to find out whether my site falls into this category? I do have access to Google Webmaster tools but I can't find anywhere that tells me how my site's been indexed. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rylaughlin0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
Redirect a page intended for iframe
we built an interactive calculator that gets iframe embedded in our blog and landing pages. the blog that embeds it is doing well the problem is that the iframe source html page is also indexed by google and is on the second page of results. which we don't want as it doesn't have any context/branding/call to action/etc. if i put a noindex meta tag on the iframe html source page, will that remove the indexing of the pages that consume it in an iframe?
Technical SEO | | icstars0 -
Redirection Plugin and Regular Expressions
I am using Wordpress and the Redirection plugin. I have recently launched a new site and while it was in development, a lot of broken pages were created and indexed. These are terminating in 404s. I am looking to redirect all traffic from: /replay/postname/ to the homepage. When I use this regular expression: Source: /replay/* Target: / it removes the /replay/ but leaves the postname. Any idea how I could redirect all traffic inside of /replay/ to the homepage? Thanks a bunch, Josh
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0