SEO implications of serving a different site on HTTPS vs. HTTP
-
I have two sites: Site A, and Site B. Both sites are hosted on the same IP address, and server using IIS 7.5. Site B has an SSL cert, and Site A does not. It has recently been brought to my attention that when requesting the HTTPS version of Site A (the site w/o an SSL cert), IIS will serve Site B...
Our server has been configured this way for roughly a year. We don't do any promotion of Site A using HTTPS URLs, though I suppose somebody could accidentally link to or type in HTTPS and get the wrong website.
Until we can upgrade to IIS8 / Windows Server 2012 to support SNI, it seems I have two reasonable options:
- Move Site B over to its own dedicated IP, and let HTTPS requests for Site A 404.
- Get another certificate for Site A, and have it's HTTPS version 301 redirect to HTTP/non-ssl.
#1 seems preferable, as we don't really need an SSL cert for Site A, and HTTPS doesn't really have any SEO benefits over HTTP/non-ssl.
However, I'm concerned if we've done any SEO damage to Site A by letting our configuration sit this way for so long. I could see Googlebot trying https versions of websites to test if they exist, even if there aren't any ssl/https links for the given domain in the wild... In which case, option #2 would seem to mostly reverse any damage done (if any). Though Site A seems to be indexed fine. No concerns other than my gut.
Does anybody have any recommendations? Thanks!
-
I would recommend option #1.
It's common for sites without SSL certs not to resolve properly at the HTTPS version of their URLs, and Google handles this fine.
You could pull the log files and take a look at how often Googlebot / other users request HTTPS versions of that site A's URLs, to determine if that SSL/redirect set up is necessary. But I would not anticipate any significant negative impact on traffic letting the HTTPS version of site A kick a 404 or server error.
-
The biggest concern in my mind would be possibly having duplicate content issues and a non-desired version of the page(s) indexed versus what you want.
I think if you have a lot of links to the non-SSL version and are using your SSL version as preferred (or vice versa) you're living a lot of link equity / juice on the table and that when you fix this issue you may see a nice jump in overall trust/ranking once you fix the issue and correctly 301 the non-preferred to preferred.
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
-
Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results on 100% responsive site
Has anyone experienced an issue where Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results than their Desktop site crawl on a 100% responsive website that passes all Google Mobile tests?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Is there a difference in SEO ranking value between a single backlink from a domain and multiple backlinks
Hi all I see that Moz gives data on Linking Domains and also External Links. The former being the number of domains which have one or more links pointing at your site and the latter the total number of links, including multiple links on the same domain. Apart from the potential benefit of people clicking the links and coming to your site and so increasing traffic, is there any SEO ranking benefit from multiple links? The only one I can think of is that you MAY get benefit from different anchor text for each link...? I'd be interested to hear any comment or experience on this. Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobBawden10 -
Is Paging Comments SEO Friendly? Implications?
So glad to be here. Just amazed to see so many discussions over here. I had a quick query. One of our my blog has more than 500 comments on almost 50+ posts (and in some posts, it's even 1000+ comments). This impacts the load time as well as the experience on mobile. So, wanted to understand if I enable pagination of comments, is it SEO friendly. Does it negatively impacts SEO? I do not want to take the route of migrating to Disqus, FB comments, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | flmgo820 -
Https Verus http
We recently changed our eCommerce site to a https from a http and we have seen a slight drop in rankings. Should we have not changed the who site over or was it the right call? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Multilingual SEO - site using Google translate within existing URL structure
Hi everyone - I've just been looking at a site that simply uses Google Translate through its website. So basically, on any page you can Google Translate the content to any language you like - there's no change to the URL structure according to language, etc. I haven't come across this approach before (simply allowing users to Google Translate withing the existing page) - and it doesn't sit well with me - let me have your thoughts re: the SEO implications. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Two websites vs. one for SEO
I recently met with a new potential client who currently has two websites for his business - one that is for the business as a whole and another that is specific to one of his particular services (his main service and what the overall business is known for). My first question was "why do you have two websites?" His response was that he has had a really hard time ranking well organically for his main service. He worked with an SEO company for two years and never was able to establish a solid organic presence for searches related to his main service - so he went ahead and had a site built to focus specifically on that service with the hope that it would help him rank organically for searches related to that service. The new site was built very recently (Dec. 2014) and it hasn't had a lot of optimization work put into it. The original site has a much higher Domain Authority, more incoming links, etc. My typical preference has always been to use one website and drive all traffic to that site, while building out specific content for any products/services on individual pages of the site. For some reason I'm torn as to what to do with this particular situation since his main concern is ranking for his core service, which hasn't happened with the original site. I'm concerned, though, that optimizing and managing two websites will be less effective than driving all of the traffic to one site, and that it could actually be detrimental overall. What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Feel free to let me know if you need any more details.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
SEO Concerns From Moving Mobile M Dot site to Responsive Version?
I currently have my mobile site set up as a m dot site. I have designed a new responsive/adaptive version of my desktop site I would like to start using. When I search from google on mobile, my website is indexed as the m dot site. When I make the switch, this will no longer be the case as I will only have one url for both mobile and desktop. The m dot url's will no longer work. Are there any SEO consequences from making this shift?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mikeylong70 -
Language Attribute - does changing it make a difference to SEO and Search?
I am an SEO newbie, but learning fast. 🙂 I am based in London, UK and have a website: www.twofourseven.co.uk. I noticed that the language attribute was set to 'en-US'. I work in London as well in international locations in the Middle East and Asia. Thinking of this I wanted to ask the experts if given that I am based in the UK, would changing the language attribute make a difference to search results? If so, would 'en' be better than 'en-GB', which might be too specific? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | twofourseven0