Http v https Duplicate Issues
-
Hello,
I noticed earlier an issue on my site.
http://mysite.com and https://mysite.com both had canonical links pointing to themselves so in effect creating duplicate content.
I have now taken steps to ensure the https version has a canonical that points to the http version but I was wondering what other steps would people recommend? Is it safe to NOINDEX the https pages? Or block them via robots.txt or both?
We are not quite ready to go fully HTTPS with our site yet (I know Google now prefers this)
Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.
-
Since HTTPS is now a ranking signal, it is better to use the HTTPS version as the canonical. I would personally make every page of the site HTTPS via 301 redirections (or rel=canonical but those can be trickier to implement).
http://site.com --301--> https://site.com
http://site.com/page1/ --301--> https://site.com/page1/
etc.This may require a few changes to the site (internal links shouldn't have unnecessary redirections, adding the HTTPS site to Search Consol (webmaster tools), etc.) so make sure you look around for resources on migration.
If you decide to keep HTTP only, do not noindex or disallow HTTPS because you may have valuable links pointing to HTTPS which help your ranking.
-
Thanks for your replies. Although I'm still confused.
I have areas of the site that are and should be https (checkout etc) and these pages have canonical links pointing to the https version.
The rest of my site however is still on http but the https versions can be accessed via their urls. What I have done today is to add a canonical tag to the https pages to point to the http pages. Is this the correct thing to do to avoid a duplicate content issue?
-
Hi,
I agree with Patrick, if you are not using the https then the safest way to ensure no canonical content is to remove it all together.
If you are using it partially such as checkouts and user areas, then you could 301 redirect the https traffic for the other pages to their https counterparts until you are ready to go full https.
Kind Regards
-
Hi there
If your site is not ready to go fully https, I would hold off on it until you are, unless you have a checkout process or information gathering portion of the site that should be https.
Reason being - the https isn't providing any ranking factor value as it's being canonicalized to the http version of your site, so you're not getting the value.
When you are ready to go https, I recommend taking a look at this Moz resource, specifically the section under SEO checklist to preserve your rankings.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Redirecting issue
Please I have a domain name miaroseworld.com I redirected (301 redirect) it to one of my domain names and I am having issues with the website so I decided to redirect to to my new site but moz is still showing redirecty to the previous websites
Technical SEO | | UniversalBlog
Even when I change the redirect on search console it still showing redirecting to the previous site.0 -
Setting up addon domains properly (bonus duplicate content issue inside)
A new client of mine is using 1and1 hosting from back in the dark ages. Turns out, her primary domain and her main website (different domain) are exactly the same. She likes to have the domains names of her books, but her intention is to have it redirect to her main site. Unfortunately, 1and1's control panel is light years behind cpanel, so when she set up her new domains it just pointed everything to the same directory. I just want to make sure I don't make this up, so please correct me if I'm wrong about something. I'm assuming this is a major duplicate content deal, so I plan to create a new directory for each add-on domain. Since her main site is an add-on itself, I'll have to move all the files into it's new home directory. Then I'll create an htaccess file for each domain and redirect it to her main site. Right so far? My major concern is with the duplicate content. She's had two sites being exactly the same for years. Will there be any issues leftover after I set everything up properly? Is there anything else I need to do? Thanks for the help guys! I'm fairly new to this community and love the opportunity to learn from the best!
Technical SEO | | Mattymar0 -
Duplicate Content Problems
Hi I am new to the seomoz community I have been browsing for a while now. I put my new website into the seomoz dashboard and out of 250 crawls I have 120 errors! So the main problem is duplicate content. We are a website that finds free content sources for popular songs/artists. While seo is not our main focus for driving traffic I wanted to spend a little time to make sure our site is up to standards. With that said you can see when two songs by an artist are loaded. http://viromusic.com/song/125642 & http://viromusic.com/song/5433265 seomoz is saying that it is duplicate content even though they are two completely different songs. I am not exactly sure what to do about this situation. We will be adding more content to our site such as a blog, artist biographies and commenting maybe this will help? Although if someone was playing multiple bob marley songs the biography that is loaded will also be the same for both songs. Also when a playlist is loaded http://viromusic.com/playlist/sldvjg on the larger playlists im getting an error for to many links on the page. (some of the playlists have over 100 songs) any suggestions? Thanks in advance and any tips or suggestions for my new site would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mikecrib10 -
Internal Duplicate Images
Question: If we had hundreds of images duplicated on a site, but different URL (tacking "-1" to the end), is that a Panda issue? Will we get penalized. I know duplicate content (web pages) pretty well, but duplicate files? That I'm unsure of.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Crawl issue
Hi I have a problem with crawl stats. Crawls Only return 3k pages while my site have 27k pages indexed(mostly duplicated content pages), why such a low number of pages crawled any help more than welcomed Dario PS: i have more campaign in place, might that be the reason?
Technical SEO | | Mrlocicero0 -
Need help with Joomla duplicate content issues
One of my campaigns is for a Joomla site (http://genesisstudios.com) and when my full crawl was done and I review the report, I have significant duplicate content issues. They seem to come from the automatic creation of /rss pages. For example: http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose is the page but the duplicate content shows up as http://www.genesisstudios.com/loose/rss It appears that Joomla creates feeds for every page automatically and I'm not sure how to address the problem they create. I have been chasing down duplicate content issues for some time and thought they were gone, but now I have about 40 more instances of this type. It also appears that even though there is a canonicalization plugin present and enabled, the crawl report shows 'false' for and rel= canonicalization tags Anyone got any ideas? Thanks so much... Scott | |
Technical SEO | | sdennison0 -
Duplicate Content Issue with
Hello fellow Moz'rs! I'll get straight to the point here - The issue, which is shown in the attached image, is that for every URL ending in /blog/category/name, it has a duplicate page of /blog/category/name/?p=contactus. Also, its worth nothing that the ?p=contact us are not in the SERPs but were crawled by SEOMoz and they are live and duplicate. We are using Pinnacle cart. Is there a way to just stop the crawlers from ?p=contactus or? Thank you all and happy rankings, James
Technical SEO | | JamesPiper0 -
301 Redirect Issue
I'm having an issue with 301 redirects: Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one... So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense? The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog." Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!! Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | EntrustSEO0