Ranking http://www when its forwarded to https://www
-
Hello,
I have a question about the best practices for assigning "https" and "http" versions. We have added https://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and was ranking. However I noticed with my other tools, that http://www.mysite.com version had better anchor text distribution and also had better Trust Flow were as the https://www.mysite.com version had no trust flow at all.
Can I assign http://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and still have it do a 301 Redirect to https://www.mysite.com. This way I can capitalize on the better anchor text profile and trust flow, and still rank properly?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks
-
Thanks for your Answer Jane!
-
Hi there,
If you 301 to https://www.mysite.com/, the authority of **http://**www.mysite.com/ will be largely attributed to the HTTPS version. That is, all the links (anchor text, etc.) pointing to the non-HTTPS version will help the HTTPS version rank well. There may be some dilution along the way, but you will not lose the benefit of those links simply because the HTTPS version is canonical and a 301 is in place.
You can feel free to specify the https version in WMT as a result. In fact, there have been murmurings that several Google employees favour HTTPS sites, but we are a long way from that being a recommendation. It's just now much more safe to say that using HTTPS is safe (it used to present some ranking / crawling issues). http://searchengineland.com/ranking-benefit-making-site-ssl-yet-googles-cutts-like-make-happen-186810
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
-
Variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Descriptive TLDs
Hi there, We have a variation on the subdomain/sub-directory question... Our business has two monetising areas, a clinic and a shop. To market them, we do recipes, blogs and social media, rather than relying primarily on SEO, but we do want to up our SEO game. Our primary site is www.example.co.uk This is Wordpress and where we market the clinic, host the recipes and blogs, and is our main email domain. Our second site is Woocommerce, at www.example.shop Our shop market is primarily in the UK, but we seem to pick up a fair amount of international business, partly because the clinic does virtual consultations to many countries. The shop is online only. We have physical clinics across the UK. Both sites cross link extensively, eg with blogs advertising products in the shop. The branding is intentionally related yet different, because they have very distinct functions, and eg. I don’t want to clutter the interface or distract people with blog or clinic once we have funnelled them to the shop checkout. I would also like to separate the blog and recipe elements from the clinic, using a slightly different theme with different functions. We use a lot of plugins, and the more we aggregate functions on the same Wordpress instance, the more likely something is to go wrong. I like the new TLDs because they are more “human”, and they identify where you are and what you are doing more clearly. We do email footers with links to example.clinic (redirected to www.example.co.uk) and example.shop. They are simple and explain what is going on. Conversely, shop.example.co.uk is not so easy to write or read out. www.example.co.uk/shop looks like an afterthought, rather than a shop in its own right with its own home page. So there would have to be a really good SEO reason for me to merge the shop into the main site with reverse proxy or multisite. Do you think that there is such a good reason? If not, by the same token, would it make sense to separate out example.blog or even naturedoc.recipes from example.clinic and use .co.uk as a single page portal to the three separate sites? My instinct, for what it is worth is that Google is smart enough to have started thinking that domains linked by topic TLDs can be equivalent to subdomains, and to recognise that we are not trying to build links from spammy unrelated sites. My last area is about human behaviour... Are people are as happy to click on or type in a new TLD like .clinic as a local .co.uk one? ...when (a) it is not a discredited TLD like .biz, and (b) it gives them more insight into what they will get when they arrive. And since we have the .uk domain, should we switch to this shorter version at the same time? I already use it for custom shortcodes (eg. example.uk/fte6 for people to type in from printed material or instagram). I can’t help feeling .uk has been unsuccessful, and its use now looks bad, even if it is shorter. Many thanks in advance.
Local SEO | | MizRabble0 -
Considering Switching Domain from .ca to .com for Service Area Business - What is the Risk / Reward?
Hello, Thank you to anyone who takes the time to share their thoughts on this. I will preface this by saying that I am very new to the community and have lots to learn, so please forgive any obvious errors on my part. That having been said am very happy to receive positive criticism and feedback 🙂 Quick Background: We are a high end mobile wellness business based in Toronto Canada offering in home/office servicing including: yoga, pilates, nutrition, meditation, chiropractors, etc... As we are expanding we are transitioning form new leads coming from business partners and word of mouth to driving new business online As such we have an new Squarespace site (which is the first site I ever built, so any feedback is welcome) and are venturing into social media, SEO, local citations etc... for the first time We have a significant content catalogue originally for client and instructor education that we are now repurposing for this new digital adventure but have not yet deployed While currently focused in Torotno, we have plans to expand to several other countries in the next two years. As the site is quite new and we have little content or incoming links I was thinking now is the time to switch to .com from .ca before we roll out Website: www.anahana.ca Risk Reward? & Other Issues? Both domains are currently verified with Squarespace, and it seems easy enough to switch. What could blow up by making this switch which I might not be aware of? Our emails and business card use the .ca, but I don't think this would matter too much 6-12 months out... is there something else I might be missing on this? .com and using subfolders or subdomains as opposed to country specific TLDs ? This is something I am still working on understanding, but from what I have learned thus far, if we are going to progressively roll out a large content library, is it not better from an SEO standpoint to have this all in one domain? Local SEO and legal considerations for TLDs when operating local Service Area Businesses. I am sure there are many other angles here that I am missing and am not really looking for any hard answer on much of this, but any general advice, suggested resources, and experienced insights would be extremely helpful. Thanks so much, cj
Local SEO | | CJ7770 -
Indexed by Google but only ranking in Bing and Yahoo
I have a website nativeamericanpalmhut.com that has been up and running for months. The sitemap was created and submitted in GWMT and the site was indexed pretty quickly. Here's where I'm lost all of the pages are indexed but only the homepage ranks and only for the exact match domain query "Native American Palm Huts". What's even more confusing is that Google Analytics and HotJar Analytics are both showing hundreds Google organic search traffic coming to the site on multiple pages (not just the homepage). This on top of the fact the that website is ranking well for several different terms in Bing and Yahoo lead me to believe this is a Google search specific problem. I have checked the backlinks to see if maybe there was a penalty on the domain but couldn't find any record of it. I've searched the Moz Q&As, Countless Google forums, etc with no luck. I'm scratching my head at the moment so if anyone has any ideas on what could be causing the problem that would be great.
Local SEO | | White_Shark_Media1 -
Video marketing strategy for new sites - Youtube / third party vs self hosted?
Howdy Mozzers, We are a new UK solar comparison site looking to implement video to help buid our site traiffic / leads. We currently make a 1 min video summary of our blog posts using Animoto and embed the video at the top of the blog post on our site. The original thought of introducing video was to help our blog posts rank higher. My question is, which of the following strategy is the best for building traffic and generating leads for our site 1. Hosting video on Youtube and embedding it on our site 2. Hosting video on Animoto and embedding it on our site (not sharing on youtube) 3. Hosting the video on our own domain and not sharing it on Youtube and other third party sites 4. Embedding the video from youtube or animoto on our site and sharing it everywhere (dailymotion, vimeo,etc) Our target audience is UK only for the time being. We would like to build traffic quickly and are focused on the short term. I would be appreciate any replies discussing the different advantages disadvantages of the options and a final personal opinion. Thanks!
Local SEO | | MozBoy0 -
Best Rank Tracking tool w/ data exports or APIs
I have briefly reviewed the API data available through the Moz API endpoints and did not see that the rank tracking data is available. I first wanted to confirm that? Second, I am looking to start tracking rank for nearly 1 million keywords (local pages multiplied by dozens of core keywords). I want to watch the rankings for a region move over time, as well as keywords generally, and then keywords in a region. My momentary initial research shows that there are a LOT of rank tracker tools, which felt a bit overwhelming to sift through them all and figure out which one would be best. My biggest needs are: handling lots of keywords and URLs exporting the data automatically (via an API or recurring export) allowing for localized results without having to qualify the keywords not breaking the bank to do so -- I'm not an SEO w/ multiple clients, these are all on 1 domain
Local SEO | | Mase0 -
Im a big fan of niche web develop/seo companies. I was wondering how many clients can you ethically take on in the same field, located in the same city
How do niche web development companies justify having multiple clients in the same field in the same cities. I would love an explanation on how to justify this, and how many clients in the same field/same city is acceptable. A good example would be an seo company for auto dealers or hotels. Thanks
Local SEO | | aholyman0 -
Have you heard of any white hat methods for influencing Google's auto suggest/auto complete?
We have a client who has a "friend" who says he can get keyword phrases that include their business name to show up in Google's auto suggest when doing a search. We have not heard much about this and are skeptical to these claims as we know how Google comes up with these suggested keyword phrases. Wondering if anyone in the community heard much about tactics to influence auto suggest/auto complete and would like to know your opinion about it.
Local SEO | | CraigSDM0 -
SEO planning: Franchise/multiple local sites
I am in the planning stages of franchising a cleaning business and was wondering if anyone had some ideas on SEO strategy. If money were no object and I had a team of hundreds of copywriters at my disposal, would the ultimate solution be to have the following sort of URL structure www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city within which there are numerous www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city/local-town pages? If this is the best strategy then is it worthwhile to begin work towards ranking for cities and local towns within them prior to actually operating there? I understand that lack of physical presence will penalize me in terms of local search but would a lack of physical address and phone number render any foundation work pointless (for example, prior to having any franchises in say London, would it be worth while building quality content and links on a www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london page, and then www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london/notting-hill, alongside a blog and so on?) Interested to understand the best way to go about this given the enormity of the campaign! Thanks
Local SEO | | EdwardoUK0
