Pro's & contra's: http vs https
-
Hi there,
We are planning to take the step and go from http to https. The main reason to do this, is to mean trustfull to our clients. And of course the rumours that it would be better for ranking (in the future).
We have a large e-commerce site. A part of this site ia already HTTPS.
I've read a lot of info about pro's and contra's, also this MOZ article: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl
But i want to know some experience from others who already done this. What did you encountered when changing to HTTPS, did you had ranking drops, or loss of links etc?I want to make a list form pro's and contra's and things we have to do in advance.
Thanx, Leonie
-
We don't use Comscore. Analytics transparently kept tracking everything without any change. We don't use Tagmanager url matching tracking, but unless you have not defined rules which include the url protocol it should not need any attention either.
-
Hi, did you encountered problems with other tools, like Google Analytics and or Tagmanager, Comscore?
Thanx, Leonie
-
We have expensive certificates now for the payed section, i think we'll use the same
i'll ask about the server support SNI, not sure about that, thanx
-
In case you choose the most expensive EV certificates as we did, for whatever is not directly visible, like the cdn serving js, css and images you can just use cheap 8 $/€ certificates.
One thing I forgot, if your server support SNI, don't use it.
We did initially, but soon found out some price engines could not read feeds, moz crawler could not crawl, and everyone on XP+IE was left out. So we disabled it.
-
Hi Max, Thansk, and good to read that you didn't lost ranking. that's my concern and also the backlinking. although you should say with a redirect all the external links i can't control will redirect to https.
We have 2 different ssl certificates now, we are looking for what we need and if we have the right ones.
If i've finished the plan and list i'll think i'll publish it here
Grtz, Leonie
-
I did it a month and half ago for a couple of websites.
Transition was smooth. I had to buy more ssl certificates than I thought for the many domains serving js css and so on... But was not a big hassle.
Just after moving from http to https I didn't notice any ranking change, and to have a good level of accurancy I monitor the same keywords with both moz ranktracker, proranktracker and semrush.
But in fact google is slowly recognizing the move few urls at time, each day you will notice some google serp start serving https url in place of http ones.
After a month we had a big jump in ranking, around +30% more keywords in the top 100 and a general increase in ranking for all the keywords already in top 10, top 30 and top 50.
But I have no idea if it's connected with the shift to https since we also constantly do many other things, get backlinks, improve on-page, etc...
At least it didn't seem to penalize the websites.
-
Hi Pixelbypixel, thanx for your reply.
Right now i'm making a plan for the switch, i'm not in a rush, so i really want to make it all clear before we go, or maybe decide not to..
I don't think most of our clients know what's secure and what isn't. But we want the opportunity to comunicate about this with our clients, something we don't have right now (only when the order something)
The ranking factor, what i read about it, is not a big thing at this moment, but indeed, in the future and can be a bigger one, so that's also a good reason to go.
Thanx for the linked articles!
Grtz, Leonie
-
I'm going to give my opinion more than a list of pros and cons, most people who switch over tend to see a drop in traffic and if you don't ensure you get it all right it can be a nightmare so make sure you've got your plan ready.
Are you sure most "clients" know what https is? Most people outside our world have no idea what it is combine with the fact that the so called ranking boost has yet to be well documented it can be fairly certain its tiny.
Now it is possible that your clients know what it is and will see it and go to your site but in most cases I suspect like the ranking boost other factors would play a bigger role. My advice is to really make sure you have all the bases covered for your transfer. Also wanted to point out in the future it may be a bigger factor.
As for advice on people who have already done it oodles of info here on Moz here are a few -
http://moz.com/community/q/http-to-https-transition-large-drop-in-search-traffic
http://moz.com/community/q/https-sitewide-move-has-resulted-in-huge-rankings-drop
http://moz.com/community/q/authority-site-drastic-ranking-drop-after-google-https-switch-please-help
Obviously people tend to come here for problems more than a shout out for how great it is so don't take that as a massive negative and all of the above is my opinion I'm sure some others will give other opinions and I don't want you to be put off just to be aware that there is a lot to cover in a switch over.
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
-
Fundamental HTTP to HTTPS Redirect Question
Hi All I'm planning a http to https migration for a site with over 500 pages. The site content and structure will be staying the same, this is simply a https migration. Can I just confirm the answer to this fundamental question? From my reading, I do not need to create 301 redirect for each and every page, but can add a single generic redirect so that all http references are redirected to https. Can I just double check this would suffice to preserve existing google rankings? Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ruislip180 -
Sitemap url's not being indexed
There is an issue on one of our sites regarding many of the sitemap url's not being indexed. (at least 70% is not being indexed) The url's in the sitemap are normal url's without any strange characters attached to them, but after looking into it, it seems a lot of the url's get a #. + a number sequence attached to them once you actually go to that url. We are not sure if the "addthis" bookmark could cause this, or if it's another script doing it. For example Url in the sitemap: http://example.com/example-category/0246 Url once you actually go to that link: http://example.com/example-category/0246#.VR5a Just for further information, the XML file does not have any style information associated with it and is in it's most basic form. Has anyone had similar issues with their sitemap not being indexed properly ?...Could this be the cause of many of these url's not being indexed ? Thanks all for your help.
Technical SEO | | GreenStone0 -
Are the duplicate content and 302 redirects errors negatively affecting ranking in my client's OS Commerce site?
I am working on an OS Commerce site and struggling to get it to rank even for the domain name. Moz is showing a huge number of 302 redirects and duplicate content issues but the web developer claims they can not fix those because ‘that is how the software in which your website is created works’. Have you any experience of OS Commerce? Is it the 302 redirects and duplicate content errors negatively affecting the ranking?
Technical SEO | | Web-Incite0 -
On-Page Report Says 'F', and I'm Confoozled As to Why
I'm primarily interested in how we failed in our "Broad Keyword Usage in Title" category. The Keyword Pair we're gunnin' for is: "Mac Windows" Our current page title is: "CrossOver: Windows on Mac and Linux with the easiest and most affordable emulator - CodeWeavers" This is, I grant, ugly. However, bear with me. SEOMoz Report Card says "Easy Fix!" and suggests: "Employ the keyword in the page title, preferrably as the first words in the element." I humbly submit that "Mac" and "Windows" IS in the page title. So what am I missing? Is it the placement of the words relative to each other, or relative to the start of the sentence? Or is the phrase "CrossOver:" somehow blocking the rest of the sentence from being read? Are colons evil? I'm genuinely mystified as to why (from a structural standpoint) our existing title tag is failing this test, and I'd be delighted for answers and/or feedback. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | CodeWeavers0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Do you get credit for an external link that points to a page that's being blocked by robots.txt
Hi folks, No one, including me seems to actually know what happens!? To repeat: If site A links to /home.html on site B and site B blocks /home.html in Robots.txt, does site B get credit for that link? Does the link pass PageRank? Will Google still crawl through it? Does the domain get some juice, but not the page? I know there's other ways of doing this properly, but it is interesting no?
Technical SEO | | DaveSottimano0 -
Just relaunched a website - why did it fall in Google's SERPs?
I work for a marketing agency that just redesigned, rewrote and relaunched a client's website. They used to rank #4 on Google for the company's name (which is a fairly common one, for what it's worth). Now they're at #10 and want to know why. I'd like to explain to them what happened but don't know myself. Can someone explain it to me? And can I tell them if/when their ranking might go back up? In case this matters, I can tell you that it looks like Google hasn't yet crawled the new site. Anyway, thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
Technical SEO | | matt-145670 -
Removing a site from Google's index
We have a site we'd like to have pulled from Google's index. Back in late June, we disallowed robot access to the site through the robots.txt file and added a robots meta tag with "no index,no follow" commands. The expectation was that Google would eventually crawl the site and remove it from the index in response to those tags. The problem is that Google hasn't come back to crawl the site since late May. Is there a way to speed up this process and communicate to Google that we want the entire site out of the index, or do we just have to wait until it's eventually crawled again?
Technical SEO | | issuebasedmedia0