Will using https across our entire site hurt our external backlinks?
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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!)
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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
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