Confused About Problems Regarding Adding an SSL
-
After reading Cyrus' article: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl, I am now completely confused about what adding SSL could do to our site. Bluehost, our hosting provider, says if we get their SSL, they just add it to our site and it's up in a few hours: no problem whatsoever. If that's true, that'd be fantastic...however, if that's true, there wouldn't need to be like 10 things you're supposed to do (according to Cyrus' article) to ensure your rankings after the switch.
Can someone clarify this for me?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Thanks Cyrus!
-
Hi Ruben,
Thanks for writing in. I'm unfamiliar with Bluehost's HTTPs service, but I assume they are taking care of top level issues. You'll still want to go through the checklist to make sure everything is valid and you follow SEO best practices.In short:
- Check your links
- Check your assets (images, CSS, javascript)
- Canonical tags
- Register with Google Webmaster Tools
- Update your sitemaps and robots.txt files
This covers the important stuff. As you noted, a few more tips here: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl
-
Maybe was obvious to everybody but 301 redirect for every single page is also a fundamental step, otherwise you are going to have broken external links, not to mention WMT which I don't think would be satisfied by just the canonical update.
Sitemap must be updated as well.
We recently switched a website from HTTP to HTTPS and in term of performance there was no difference after the update, at least according to WMT and analytics.
I was kind of scared before to update but at the end everything was smoother than expected, WMT took around 10 days to completely re-index the https version.
But of course we kept finding some non https link embedded here and there in some pages for days and we had to manually edit some content to avoid ssl warning from browsers.
-
I have no idea what CMS you are using but check the server side code generating the link, not just the code sent to the browser.
We recently switched to SSL, and our CMS was already building internal links on pages using the protocol of the http request.
-
Thanks Highland!
-
Great, thanks!
-
Ruben, I had a look at your website and your URLs all have HTTP in them so these would need to be updated all across your site before you make the switch to HTTPS. Because you are using WordPress this should be as simple as updating the site URL to https://www.kempruge.com.
The tip by @Highland about using Firebug is excellent. This will allow you to quickly debug if there are non-HTTPS links remaining - in the WordPress theme or template, for example.
Have a look at the WordPress HTTPS documentation also.
-
Hi Alex,
I'm not really sure if we use a protocol-less linking pattern or not. I don't see http:// in any of our urls, so if that's the criteria I'm guessing we don't? I included a screenshot of one of our URLs. Would you mind telling me if it's clear from the image whether we do or do not?
Thanks for your response. I really appreciate your time and input.
Best,
Ruben
-
One major tip I always point people to is that using protocol-less links for anything external is a great way to make sure your site always supports SSL without issue.
Firebug is a great way to make sure everything is loading HTTPS. Turn it on, switch to the Net tab, and load your page. It will show you every request sent as part of your page. It makes spotting non-SSL requests easy.
You can turn HSTS on yourself if your provider uses Apache and supports htaccess. (sorry I can't link an article, Moz won't let me). If they don't, you will have to have your host enable it on their end.
-
Implementing SSL should be straightforward for the most part
You need to ensure that links around your site (including canonical links) are updated to use HTTPS (so https://example.com/link as opposed to http://example.com/link where example.com is your domain name). If you are already using a protocol-less linking pattern (//example.com/link) you don't need to update the links.
You can also configure your web server to only serve HTTPS. If your web server is Apache you can do this with the SSLRequireSSL directive.
<code><location>SSLRequireSSL</location></code>
HTTPS also causes a significant slow-down as the browser and the server negotiate a secure connection. If your site has already been optimized for speed it should not cause a problem but if in doubt revisit that process and ensure that you are getting the best possible speed for your visitors.
The article by Cyrus has a great checklist to double check everything.
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
-
Should you automatically resolve URLs with extra trailing slashes added by accident?
Hi - I was just wondering whether a URL with extra trailing slashes should actuall redirect to the version without the extra trailing slashes... e.g. www.domainname.com/folder////// should automatically resolve to www.domainname.com/folder/ - what is your opinion on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Having possible problems with rankings due to development website
Hi all, I've got an interesting issue and a bit of a technical challenge for you. It's a bit complicated to explain, but please bear with me. We have a client website (http://clientwebsite.com) which we are having a hard time ranking in the past few months. Main keywords simply don't show up in Top100 searches, even though we are constantly building backlinks through Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc. Normally, we use ahrefs to look at the client's website backlinks, but just today we used Majestic to look at the backlink profile and one backlink stood out. This is a backlink from a development server (http://developmentwebsite.com) which redirects to http://clientwebsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg
The developers who were working on the redesign of the client website, put it up on their server and forgot to delete it.
Also, the content inside the development website is almost identical with the client website. We then checked to see if http://developmentwebsite.com is indexed.
It's not. Although, inside the robots file http://developmentwebsite.com/robots.txt there's:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
The funny (and weird thing) is that http://developmentwebsite.com/ and all development website inner pages are not indexed in Google. But if we go to http://developmentwebsite.com/inner-page, it doesn't redirect to the corresponding http://clientwebsite.com/inner-page, it's the same development website page URL and the pages even have links to the client website, but like I said, none of the pages of the development website are indexed, even though crawlers are allowed in the robots.txt's development website. In your opinion, could this be the reason why we are having a hard time to rank the client website? Second question is:
How do we approach in solving this issue?
Do we simply delete the whole http://developmentwebsite.com with all the inner pages?
Or should we do 301 redirrects on a per-page basis?0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Will Nofollow in Nav Cause a Problem?
I have seen conflicting information regarding the use of rel=nofollow on internal links, but the gist of it seems to be that it's not a good idea. The top linked page on a particular site is a consultation page. Contact is not far behind. Both are linked from the header and footer or sidebar. At first, I thought no-following them would be the perfect solution. After what I've read, it seems I need to remove some of the instances of linking instead of nofollowing. Any e firsthand experience or feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Title tags with >70 characters but most important words at start. Is this really a problem?
Is there in fact any kind of negative impact having title tags longer than 70 characters, as long as I place the most important keywords at the start and make sure that title still is compelling when cut somewhere around 70 characters? Are the additional words after the 70 characters limit just ignored? May additional words dillute the strength of the first words or may they even be helpful ? Any experience or any studies you know about impact of longer title tags? Or any statement from google about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Duplicate Page Title problems with Product Catalogues (Categories, Subcategories etc.)
Hey guys, I've done a fair bit of Googling and "mozzing" and can't seem to find a definitive solution. In our product catalogue on our site we have multiple ways to access the product for navigation purposes, and SeoMoz is throwing up hundreds of duplicate page title errors which are basically just different ways to get to the same product yet it sees it as a "separate page" and thus duplicating itself. Is this just SeoMoz confusing itself or does Google actually see it this way too? For example, a product might be: www.example.com/region/category/subcategory/ www.example.com/region2/category/subcategory/ www.example.com/region/category/subcategory2/ etc. Is the only solution to have the product ONLY listed in one combination? This kind of kills our ability to have easy refinement for customers browsing the catalogue, i.e: something that falls under the "Gifts for Men" might also be a match for "Father's Day Gifts" or "Gifts for Dad" etc. Any solution or advice is greatly appreciated, cheers 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Any good link buying companies ( http://www.text-link-ads.com )
Hi guys I have been passed this website: http://www.text-link-ads.com Has anyone ever used text-links ads before?? Can anyone please show me the way and suggest any really good lin buying companies? I am really fiding it hard to find good places to place inbound links into our website.. Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Problem of indexing
Hello, sorry, I'm French and my English is not necessarily correct. I have a problem indexing in Google. Only the home page is referenced: http://bit.ly/yKP4nD. I am looking for several days but I do not understand why. I looked at: The robots.txt file is ok The sitemap, although it is in ASP, is valid with Google No spam, no hidden text I made a request for reconsideration via Google Webmaster Tools and it has no penalties We do not have noindex So I'm stuck and I'd like your opinion. thank you very much A.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon0