Will using https across our entire site hurt our external backlinks?
-
Our site is secured throughout, so it loads sitewide as https. It is canonicalized properly - any attempt to load an existing page as http will force to https. My concern is with backlinks. We've put a lot of effort into social media, so we're getting some nice blog linkage. The problem is that the links are generally to http rather than https (understandable, since that's the default for most web users). The site still loads with no problem, but my concern is that since a redirect doesn't transfer all the link juice across, we're leaking some perfectly good link credit. From the standpoint of backlinkage, are we harming ourselves by making the whole site secure by default? The site presently isn't very big, but I'm looking at adding hundreds of new pages to the site, so if we're going to make the change, now is the time to do so. Let me know what you think!
-
We run one site with all https and there is no problem at all - we link build as usual and see no bad impacts, in fact we are doing very well.
It's not usual practice but for SEO as long as you are playing by the rules it will have no impact whatsoever.
-
Yes -- I actually just got done reverting back from HTTPS -> HTTP because of the handshake. Think about this.
- How many images does the page have? All of your images need to have SSL.
- How many styles and external style sheets? All of your style sheets need to have SSL
- Does all of the sites you link to have SSL as well? I found that if I link something it can sometimes red flag that there are elements in the page that are not secure.
It's a lot of work and a lot of maintenance and at the end: the visitor gets frustrated and leaves. Even if you are at rackspace and you have a dedicated SSL proxy server with load bouncers and it auto scales. The clients browser still needs to form a relationship with the SSL certificate for all of the images/scripts on your page.
-
your backlinks will suffer. You need to go and 301 each of the http pages to the https ones. That being said 301s do not pass 100% of link juice on and many people will continue to link to the http pages.
Do you really need every page to be https? why not just have the key data exchange pages as https and the rest as http?
-
I would seriously consider the possibility of making only as much of your site https as is really necessary.
That said, the portion of your link juice being lost due to the redirects is probably relatively insignificant. But if you could keep half the site as http, that would cut your leakage in half.
-
There's very rarely any reason to force SSL for an entire site. Any content that you're trying to SEO, obviously has no need to be encrypted.
SSL puts a huge overhead on page load time.
-
We have the same issue. Our site is 100% SSL. We use 301 redirects for any http requests to go to https instead. We rank well in the SERPs for phrases we care about. I'm pretty sure the link juice is flowing from http to https because of the 301s (many of our external links are http).
(and, SEOMoz folks: really looking forward to your crawl tool working with https sites!)
-
Don't really see a way around it. Only force HTTPS on pages that need it. If you can operate at 80% HTTP and 20% HTTPS, that is much better, as people rarely link to HTTPS pages.
So yes, change it
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
-
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 -
Want to move site to wordpress and keep links without using redicrects
I have an old cluny site that has been around for about 56 years. It is on the homestead platform. I want to move the site to a thesis theme 2.1 wordpress platform without losing my links. I would prefer not to do 301 redicrects. With thesis I can specify the URL for each page of the wordpress site, however the wordpress site is hosted on hostgator as a subdomain of another site and the other problem is that wordpress adds a back slash that is not present on the old site. I can, however add .html to the URL's for pages on the wordpress site to conform to the URL's on the old html site. Will this work? thx Paul p.s. the URL for my old site is www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com
Technical SEO | | diogenes0 -
Still ok to use
This is the flag to prevent google storing a copy of your webpage. I want to use it for good reasons but in 2013 is it still safe to use. My websites not spammy but it's still very fresh with little to no links. Each item I sell takes a lot of research to both buy and sell with the correct info. Once it's sold one I may just come across another and want to hold my advantage of having already done my research and my sold price to myself. Competitors will easily find my old page from a long tail search. Some off my old sold pages keep getting hits and high bounce rates from people using it as reasearch and price benchmark. I want to stop this. So, No archive first, then 301 to category page once sold. Will the two cause a problem in googles eyes?
Technical SEO | | Peter24680 -
Will a 303 redirect hurt us?
Our membership based website is using a 303 redirect to handle the redirection of users back to the login page when those users try to access a page behind the logged in firewall. Said another way, if a user is not yet logged in, we redirect them to the login page using a 303 redirection. Unfortunately, Googlebot get this redirection too and after a recent audit, we're thinking this isn't the best way to handle this. For pages which require a user to login first, should we: A) index and 303 redirect to the login page (what we are currently doing) B) index and 302 redirect to the login page C) noindex those pages D) Remove any special treatment and let Google figure it out. Thanks in advance for your help! David
Technical SEO | | voicesdotcom0 -
Site revision
our site has complete redesign including site architecture, page url and page content (except domain). It looks like a new site. The old site has been indexed about thirty thousand results by google. now what should i do first?
Technical SEO | | jallenyang0 -
How many days for a Backlink
Hi One week ago, i created a blog on wordpress added the url of my blog on google, bing and yahoo. In that blog i put a link of my webshop (the site im working on SEO) but when i checked the backlinks of my webshop (with seomoz tools and yahoo explorer) , the link from the blog still doesnt show. How many days it takes for a backlink to be registered ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | nipponx0 -
What's the best way to deal with an entire existing site moving from http to https?
I have a client that just switched their entire site from the standard unsecure (http) to secure (https) because of over-zealous compliance issues for protecting personal information in the health care realm. They currently have the server setup to 302 redirect from the http version of a URL to the https version. My first inclination was to have them simply update that to a 301 and be done with it, but I'd prefer not to have to 301 every URL on the site. I know that putting a rel="canonical" tag on every page that refers to the http version of the URL is a best practice (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394), but should I leave the 302 redirects or update them to 301's. Something seems off to me about the search engines visiting an http page, getting 301 redirected to an https page and then being told by the canonical tag that it's actually the URL they were just 301 redirected from.
Technical SEO | | JasonCooper0