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
-
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
Do you get penalized in search results when you use a heading tag, but it's not technically a heading (used for emphasis)?
Do you get penalized in search results when you use a heading tag, but it's not technically a heading? My clients are using heading tags for text they want to emphasize and make stand out. Does this affect search rankings for SEO?
Technical SEO | | jthompson05130 -
Is it problematic for Google when the site of a subdomain is on a different host than the site of the primary domain?
The Website on the subdomain runs on a different server (host) than the site on the main domain.
Technical SEO | | Christian_Campusjaeger0 -
Linking out to authoritive sites from my ecommerce site
Good afternoon SEOmoz community. I was looking for a specific answer or advice or opinion about linking out to other sites. My Site www.tacticalbootstore.com has been undergoing a complete content rewrite. In the process we have been told and read where it can be good to link out to other authoritive sites. One of the pages we have rewritten is here. http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/belleville-boots-sizing-chart-a-97.html We have not added the graphics yet as they are being built now. This is just an informational page about sizing of a particular manufacturers boots. Once you get to the bottom of the text we have added a link to the actual manufacturers page. Is this helpful for us in the SERPS or not? Thank you for your time. Chris
Technical SEO | | scamper0 -
Redirects in site map
I have a site with the ace/sef ( creates friendly URLS) in a large data base site. It creates a site map dynamically. Yet I realize one issue which I am trying to think through. I recently changed my urls to include an ID number example: homepage/houses/1134-big-blue-house The prior url was: homepage/houses/big-blue-house the original url above redirects to the new one with the ID like I want. However the site map has both URLS in it which go to same page I am not sure but it seems rather stupid to have the new URL and OLD redirected URL in the site map. Yet beside stupid I am wondering if this is duplicate content and will cause a penalty from the google bot. What is your opinion ?
Technical SEO | | aimiyo0 -
Help optimising this site
Hi I have been optimising this site http://seakayakdevon.co.uk/ which is a wordpress site since making changes to it recently the site is now indexed and appearing among its competitors. trouble is they still are placed higher rn the SE rankings. i wish to optimise for local search i.e on Google places etc. but the trouble is there is'nt a physical address for the business it is run from various coastal locations. any ideas how i can still market for local search- maps etc. I have done the following optimisation: sitemaps title tag, description tag improved content removed duplicate content an blocker pages replace image text and replaced with header tag improved page names - making them static any advice of guidance would be greatly appreciated- will the fatc its built in wordpress limit its ability to gain better ranking in the SE? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Optimize flash site
Hello, How can we optimize a site like this - http://www.ziba.com.au/ . The whole site is in flash. What are the alternatives ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Will Google index a 301 redirect for a new site?
So here is the problem... We have setup a 301redirect for our clients website. When you search the clients name it comes up with the old .co.uk website. We have made this redirect to the new .com website. However on the SERPs when it shows the .co.uk it shows the old title pages which currently say 'Holding Page'. When you click on that link it takes you to the fully functioning .com website. My question is, will the title tags in the SERPs which show the .co.uk update to the new ones from the .com? I'm thinking it will be just a case of Google catching up on things and it will sort itself out eventually. If anyone could help I would REALLY appreciate it. Thanks Chris
Technical SEO | | Weerdboil0