How to work round issue with SEOMOZ not supporting SSL?

[jcarter]

I have a website that it running via SSL, to secure the website, to reassure the customer is browsing (and so will be purchasing) on a secure website, and to show off the green address bar which many of my competitors do not have.

However in my campaign I am getting on Links showing, with my rank reporting '1', surely this cannot be!

I asked a Help question, and the only response was: "Unfortunately, we don't currently support https for our linkscape crawls. This is definitely something that we plan to implement in the future though! I hope that helps and I apologize for any inconveniences!"

This definately does not help.. Is there any way of working around this issue, or will I be forced to cancel my SEOMOZ membership?

[jcarter]

Thanks I'll try this to see if it can get Linkscape up and going again.... hopefully then I can get my SeoMoz subscription back.

[RyanKent]

The seomoz crawler agent is rogerbot.

User-agent: rogerbot

[jcarter]

Hello Shawn,

Sorry for the late reply. If I allow Roger the Search Bot access to a http version of my website, will that appear in the linkscape index?

If so, can I have the user agent of the mozbot so that I exclude it from the user-agents that are forced to use HTTPS?

This is the reason I have cancelled my SEOMOZ Pro membership, so I'd really like to have it sorted so I can rejoin

Kind Regards,
James

[jcarter]

It appears this only applies to page crawling and not the linkscape reports (mozTrust etc)

[jcarter]

SSL is not as performance killing as people link, see this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/149274/http-vs-https-performance

I want to implement SSL for my application, and I want seomoz to provide the metrics for it, if that is not possible that is fine, I just wanted to check before I went to another provider.

[RyanKent]

I understand you wish to demonstrate the value you offer, but running the entire site in SSL is not the way to do it. It is a negative experience for both the user and you to run the site in SSL.

1. It will eat your bandwidth. If you are hosted on VPS your hosting expenses will increase. If you are on a shared server with no extra bandwidth charges, then all of your pages will load slower because of the increased data transfer.

2. Images from a secured server cannot be cached. Images are the biggest use of bandwidth and page loading speed. Your increased bandwidth usage will be amplified, and users will take another noticeable performance hit when accessing your site.

3. A third performance hit is that on each side the data has to be encrypted and decrypted. Have you tried running any performance testing?

4. Many users will never notice the green bar, and have absolutely no idea what it represents.

Apache covers issues related to SSL response times in their FAQ: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/ssl/ssl_faq.html#load

[DanHill]

I do believe seoMoz now supports https -> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-seomoz-pricing-plans-more-keywords-for-everyone

[jcarter]

I want to assure the customer the site is secure straight from their entry to the first page. SSL doesnt really cost anything to implement so it makes sense to have it on the whole site.

I'm more after how to get the equivalent moz trust factors etc in my SEOPro

[DanHill]

Personally I'd only have secure pages for actual payment pages - the rest of them I'd have normal pages since the only time a visitor is really going to worry about SSL/secure pages is when they go though to the payment section/page.

'Continue to secure payment' or something of the sort