Https-pages still in the SERP's

[accessKellyOCG]

Hi all,

my problem is the following: our CMS (self-developed) produces https-versions of our "normal" web pages, which means duplicate content.

Our it-department put the <noindex,nofollow>on the https pages, that was like 6 weeks ago.</noindex,nofollow>

I check the number of indexed pages once a week and still see a lot of these https pages in the Google index. I know that I may hit different data center and that these numbers aren't 100% valid, but still... sometimes the number of indexed https even moves up.

Any ideas/suggestions? Wait for a longer time? Or take the time and go to Webmaster Tools to kick them out of the index?

Another question: for a nice query, one https page ranks No. 1. If I kick the page out of the index, do you think that the http page replaces the No. 1 position? Or will the ranking be lost? (sends some nice traffic :-))...

thanx in advance

[accessKellyOCG]

Hi Irving,

yes, you are right. The https login page is the "problem", other pages that I visit after are staying on https, as all the links on these page are https links. So you could surf all the pages on the domain in a https mode, if you visited the login page before

I spoke to our it department about this problem and they told me it would take time to program our CMS different. My boss then told me to find another, cheaper solution -  so I came up with the noindex,nofollow.

So, do you see another solution whithout having to ask our it department again? They< are always very busy and almost have no time for nobody

[accessKellyOCG]

Hi Malcolm,

thankx for the help. Before we put the noindex, nofollow on these pages, I thought about using the rel=canonical.

To be honest, I did not choose rel=canonical because I think that the noindex,nofollow ia a stronger sign for Google, and that the rel=canonical is more like a hint, which G does not always follow... but sure, i can be wrong!

You are saying that the noindex could end worse. The https-pages only contain links to https-pages, think of these pages like "normal" pages, same content, link structure etc. etc. Every URL just is a https, internal, external....

So I thought the noindex,nofollow would not hurt the http pages, because they cannot be found on the https ones - what do you think?

[john4math]

Is there a reason you're supporting both http and https versions of every page?  If not, 301 redirect to either http or https for each page.  I'd only leave pages that need to be secure as https, e.g. purchase pages.  Non-secure pages are generally a better user experience in terms of load time since the user can use cached files from previous pages and non-encrypted pages are more lightweight.

If you're out to support both for those secure users who like https everywhere, I'd go with Malcolm's solution and rel canonical to the version you'd like to have indexed rather than using noindex nofollow.

[irvingw]

do you have absolute links on your site that are keeping https?

For example, if you go to a secure login page and then click a homepage navigation link on the secure https page do you see the homepage link going back to http or staying on https?

That is usually the cause of this problem you should look into that. I would not manually request removal of the pages in WMT  i would just fix the problem and let google update it itself.

[MalcolmGibb]

have you tried canonicalising the http version?

Using a noindex nofollow rule could end up being worse as you are telling Google not to follow the pages or index them and this will include both http and https.