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
-
Will 301s to Amazon Hurt Site?
We have 155 podcasts and in many we have affiliate links to Amazon. But I recently found out that one of the two products we are promoting is no longer available. I now have to fix many podcast descriptions. My thought is maybe to build a link like: financiallysimple.com/camera and 301 it to the Amazon product. That way if the product changes, I simply change where the 301 points. Simple. BUT my question is does that bouncing people offsite immediately hurt us? Are there any other options that will accomplish the same goal?
Technical SEO | | jgoethert
Thanks!1 -
We are migrating a site and are seeing alot of 301s and 302s already in the old site is it ok to leave those as is?
For the 3xx’s I’m not sure if it’s okay for us to redirect to these so please advise on that
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
How can I get Google to forget an https version of one page on my site?
Google mysteriously decided to index the broken, https version of one page on my company's site (we have a cert for the site, but this page is not designed to be served over https and the CSS doesn't load). The page already has many incoming links to the http version, and it has a canonical URL with http. I resubmitted it on http with webmaster tools. Is there anything else I could do?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Bing is not Indexing my site.
Hi, My website is four months old and has more than 8000 pages. Bing has indexed only 8 pages till date and Google also keeps playing hide and seek with it. There was a time when google indexed almost all the pages of my site but now there are only 5000 pages indexed. Moreover when I check my site on google (by typing site:socktail.com), it shows only 26 pages. Please let me know what should I do. If somebody wants to take a look, my website is http://socktail.com Thanks
Technical SEO | | saurabh19050 -
Do I use /es/, /mx/ or /es-mx/ for my Spanish site for Mexico only
I currently have the Spanish version of my site under myurl.com/es/ When I was at Pubcon in Vegas last year a panel reviewed my site and said the Spanish version should be in /mx/ rather than /es/ since es is for Spain only and my site is for Mexico only. Today while trying to find information on the web I found /es-mx/ as a possibility. I am changing my site and was planning to change to /mx/ but want confirmation on the correct way to do this. Does anyone have a link to Google documentation that will tell me for sure what to use here? The documentation I read led me to the /es/ but I cannot find that now.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Does anyone use inspect firebug for their site
Hi, i am using wordpress for the first time, i normally use joomla, but now i have been recommend to use inspect firebug to help me sort problems on my site which includes the title of the home page, www.cheapflightsgatwick.com being called - lanzarote reviews - cheap flights gatwick but it should say cheap flights reviews magazine The problem i have with firebug is understanding what it is telling me and where things are, i would like to know if anyone uses this product and if so how easy or hard have they found using it
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Will an identical site impact SERP results
I came across two identical sites for two different business owners in the same industry. I'm sure you've seen these. A web company offers individuals in the same profession a template site with the exact same content for each site. All that is different is the domain. i.e. mycompany.com/news/topicsname will have the exact same content, images, tags, etc. as mycompany2.com/news/topicsname. I would assume having the duplicate content, especially if two site owners are in the same town, will ultimately hurt the rankings of at least one site. Is this correct? Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | STF0 -
Site maps, Is there any benefit?
I have a relatively simple and small site (60 pages). All of it is crawlable and there is nothing I want non follow. So, is there any real benefit to a sitemap since Google can get to all the site anyway? Do they give the site more credence or something because it's there? I guess as an aside, are there any favorite sites that will generate a site map? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0