Moving to https
-
Hi all and thanks for taking the time to read my question.
We are going to migrate a very small website from http to https, its a roughly 9 page site with 5 of those being product pages.
I figured I would have to set a canonical and permanent 301 redirects for each page.
But our tech guys suggested just doing a binding to https so any traffic hitting our site with a http url would automatically get redirected to the https version.
So if someone land on http://mydomain, it would automatically return https://mydomain
Does this sound correct or would we need to do additional tasks even if we go down the binding route?thanks again for looking.
-
Here's the step-by-step right and easy way:
-
1. Sign-up for Google Webmaster Tools and create individual sites for 4 variants of your website:
-
http non-www
-
http www
-
https non-www
-
https www
-
2. Set the preferred domain among the above four.
-
3. Add an canonical URL for all pages for either https://www. or https://.., whichever you choose.
-
4. Add 301 redirect from http:// to https:// via htaccess using mod_rewrite.
-
5. Use Google Webmaster Tools "Fetch as Google", under "Crawl" in your http:// sites to confirm that http://.. gets redirected and optionally submit those redirects to be indexed by Google (just to make sure).
-
6. Build and submit a sitemap for your preferred domain site (one of the https://..) via Google Webmaster Tools.
-
7. Optionally, connect your Google Analytics property with your preferred domain site in Google Webmaster Tools.
-
-
This sounds odd to me - in my experience, if you want to load one page by a server sends you another, that's a redirect. It doesn't matter how the technology works on the server side as long as the initial URL returns a 301 before the server returns a different page.
It's possible that you and your tech guys aren't really talking about different things, you're just coming at it from different angles. Could you ask them to implement the solution they're suggesting, then use http://httpstatus.io/ to test an http:// URL to see what server code it returns? That might be a good way to communicate what you're looking for. The important thing here is to stress that your tech guys can code the server however they want, as long as it has the right output (301 redirects).
And, of course, use canonicals.
-
I would suggest migrating the whole site, and 301 redirecting all the http pages to the https versions. Without a proper redirect you risk the possibility of losing any link juice that would be directed at that page. A canonical should technically cover that, but the hard 301 leaves no room for robot interpretation.
Also, why leave the http version when you have a secure version available?
-
We have been considering switching to https as well, what are the pros and cons of doing this that you have heard on your end?
Make sure you have proper redirects as well.
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
-
Moving E-Commerce Store to Subdomain?
Hi all, We have a customer who currently uses Square for their in-store point-of-sale system as well as for their e-commerce website. From my understanding, a Square site is a watered-down version of Weebly, and is proving to be highly restrictive from an SEO and content structuring standpoint. It's been an uphill battle to try and get traction for their site in SERPs. Would it be a bad idea to move the entire Square online store to a subdomain, and install WordPress on the root domain? This way their online store would remain as-is, but the primary pages on the site would be on WordPress which would give us a lot more control over the content. I just want to make sure this doesn't negatively impact their SEO. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | suarezventures0 -
Canonical Tags Before HTTPS MIgration
Hi Guys I previously asked a question that was helpfully answered on this forum, but I have just one last question to ask. I'm migrating a site tomorrow from http to https. My one question is that it was mentioned that I may need to "add canonical tags to the http pages, pointing to their https equivalent prior to putting the server level redirect in place. This is to ensure that you won't be causing yourself issues if the redirect fails for any reason." This is an e-commerce site with a number of links, is there a quick way of doing this? Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ruislip180 -
Changing Domains - 301 old https to new https
Brief History: Our company made change to a new domain. Both domains had an SSL configured on it in which the old domain SSL was controlled and created by Shopify which gave us limited control. Because we couldn't redirect the old https:// to the new https:// So basically we duplicated our new HTML website and put canonical ref on all duplicate pages to the final domain to help get search to navigate to the newer domain. Question: In the near future I would like to take down the old domain and do a 301 domain forwarding. What is the correct course of action to complete this? Our old domain was indexed and SERP results were tied to it's https:// url's.
Technical SEO | | bnewt1 -
Moving content to a new domain
I need to move a lot of content with podcasts and show notes to a new domain. Instead of doing redirects, we want to keep some content on the current domain to retain the link value. There are business reason to keep content on both websites but the new website will primarily be used for SEO moving forward.If we keep the audio portion of the podcast on the old website and move the show notes and the audio portion of the podcast to the new website, is there any issues with duplicate content?Long-term, I presume Google will re-index the old and the new pages, thus no duplicate content, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I was planning to fetch pages in Search Console as we migrate content.Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | JimmyFritz0 -
Should we dump the https from a client site?
We inherited a site that has both http and https. No e-commerce or data transfer...just html. Should we dump the https certificate? I think it might be causing issues with indexing and possible duplicate content. The https site has a certificate warning message...not good. The URL is www.charlottemechanical.com
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0 -
Https Duplicate Content
My previous host was using shared SSL, and my site was also working with https which I didn’t notice previously. Now I am moved to a new server, where I don’t have any SSL and my websites are not working with https version. Problem is that I have found Google have indexed one of my blog http://www.codefear.com with https version too. My blog traffic is continuously dropping I think due to these duplicate content. Now there are two results one with http version and another with https version. I searched over the internet and found 3 possible solutions. 1 No-Index https version
Technical SEO | | RaviAhuja
2 Use rel=canonical
3 Redirect https versions with 301 redirection Now I don’t know which solution is best for me as now https version is not working. One more thing I don’t know how to implement any of the solution. My blog is running on WordPress. Please help me to overcome from this problem, and after solving this duplicate issue, do I need Reconsideration request to Google. Thank you0 -
Move the content from mycompany.es to mycompany.com is worth it?
Hi, I've been using mycompany**.es** for 6 month and i'm quite happy with the results, recently I had the oprtunity to buy the same domain with .com (mycompany**.com**). It is worth it to move all the content to the new domain or i wont get any beneffit to be at .com insted of .es? Other facts: my target customer is spain
Technical SEO | | alfonsmr
the page is in spanish only
mycompany.es is 6 month old
mycompany**.com** is 8 years old Thanks in advance.0 -
Help! Need advice for a new HTTPS URL!
Hi. We have just launched a new website that is fully secure with the HTTPS url. You can still access the home page with an ordinary HTTP address. That is what we want to change. Should we forward the HTTP url to the HTTPS? Redirect? It is the same URL for both. http://www.parrotmoon.com Thank you for all ideas! Jay
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0