Help with Temporary Redirects on Pages

[jeeyer]

Hi Guys,

My latest crawl shows this: "44% of site pages served 302 redirects during the last crawl" When I click this  to investigate the issue I see:

URL:
https://www.....
https://www.....
https://www.....
https://www.....
https://www.....

And under Redirect URL:
http://www.... 
http://www.... 
http://www....

I've recently read an article from Yoast that this is a https:// to http:// redirect (ofcourse ).
but why is this an issue that needs to be solved and how do I solved it?

Thanks again for your help and thoughts.

Joost

[jeeyer]

Also found this article on Yoast.com: Moving your website to HTTPS

He says:
'If you’re a web shop or otherwise transactional website you probably already have SSL for your checkout.
If so, moving your entire website to https makes a LOT of sense to me, it’s probably actually easier to maintain and makes sure that you’re doing everything to make sure your SSL traffic (and thus the most important section of your site) is as fast as possible.'

Moving to HTTPS is something different than 301 redirecting I suppose? Yoast says:
_'All of your internal links should start to use https, not just to pages, but for images, JavaScript, CSS, etc.
This means going through your theme with a fine comb and cleaning all of those up.
Of course you can have your web server redirect http to https (more on that below), but not having to do the redirect is a lot cheaper.'

Thanks again! Joost_

[jeeyer]

Hey Chris and Patrick,

Thanks for taking the time to write and help me out really appreciate it!

Ok so I understand that a 301 is the way to go but what is better http:// to https:// or https:// to http://
(now I'm doing the last one if I'm correct, or is this a stupid question and can it only be done one way around?).

I'm working in Wordpress with Woocommerce. I've got the htaccess plugin to update the htaccess file easily.
I also have a HTTPS plugin but not sure if i need to be there to change anything.

Thanks guys!

Joost

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Fully agree with Chris here.

You should also be able to set this up in your htaccess as well, which will handle all http to https redirects (or vice versa) - more information here.

Like Chris said, this will all depend on your CMS and site setup. I would also suggest checking your internal links, update your XML sitemap, and upload that sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools to reflect this change.

I would also suggest using relative URLs in your internal links, that way if you change your domain or protocol, you don't have to individually update every internal link on your site. This is more for convenience for you and your team.

Just wanted to add a few more things - hope this helps a bit! Good luck!

[GPainter]

To understand the issue you need to understand what a 302 is vs. a 301

a 302 is a temporary redirect, it tells search engines that this redirect is temporary and so the value of that page is never really moved in the eyes of Google and alike

a 301 is a permanent redirect which tells search engines that you've move that page and its never going back, Search engines then also move all the other gooness (like link juice) with this.

You want a 302 because it allocated all more page value compared to a 302, you can read more here -

http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

In short because you're running a 302 redirect you're splitting the value of your site between the http & htts, and should be running a 301

change the redirects to a 301 and you will be fine, as for the how it depends on your CMS but i'm sure a bit of Googling can give you a hand.

Hope that helps & good luck.