Does my website need the SSL Cert / HTTPS Update?
-
So, I own a car shipping company called Car Shipping Carriers ( www.carshippingcarriers.com ) and I am trying to find out if I need the SSL Cert / HTTPS for the site. I attached a picture that shows I dropped a HUGE amount of rank back in the beginning of August 2014 and that the SSL/HTTPS update happened at nearly the exact same time.
I do have a quote box on my website asking for: Name, Phone, Email, Origin, Destination, Move Date, Year/Make/Model of Vehicle, and Carrier Type.
I was unsure if I needed the HTTPS because I am not asking for sensitive data, but it seems that I might need to bite the bullet and update the site to HTTPS.
What do you all think? Any expert opinion and/or advice?
-
I very much agree with this. Get an audit done first to uncover what happened last year around the time the HTTPS "thing" was announced, then move forward.
For your case, HTTPS could help with conversions, but I wouldn't count on it to help with SEO.
-
So, first off, you don't NEED to go full HTTPS. The SEO benefit (if there is one) is minor at best. If it were a large benefit then people would be driving hard towards full HTTPS. Google doesn't require any data be submitted over HTTPS, but PCI compliance does. You don't take credit cards so that doesn't apply.
If you want to try SSL for free, my suggestion is to switch to CloudFlare DNS and use their Universal SSL product. This way you can stick HTTPS on your site without changing anything. You can use an unsigned certificate on your site if you want to go full SSL. Cloudflare only encrypts between their servers and your clients, not between you and CloudFlare. Full SSL doesn't require a valid SSL, just any SSL certificate (Cloudflare doesn't validate between you and them). Once that's done, be sure to enable HSTS to force all traffic through HTTPS
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
-
Was there Algorithm update over last weekend (sep 29-30 2018)?
Howdy fellow mozzers, This morning, during our weekly client meeting, I have noticed that pretty much all of our clients' rankings went down a little after a weekend. Nothing major, but noticeable enough on the rankings graph. The MOZcast shows that there was some kinda activity over the weekend with higher than normal temperatures. Anyone has any idea?
Algorithm Updates | | DmitriiK0 -
How much do branded search organic traffic & direct traffic impact the ranking for their non-branded topic/keyword?
Hi Moz community, We can see many websites with a reputation will have more number of visitors landing with these two types of traffic mostly (>90%): organic traffic of brand queries and direct traffic. Will these visits help and impact the ranking of these websites for the keywords/topics they been employing? Ex: Moz will have many such visitors. Will this really impact the ranking of Moz for non-brand queries they try to rank for, like "SEO Software". If so, will this have a huge impact or it's just a minor ranking factor. Because we have this with our website and we don't see such boost in rankings compared to our competitors with less direct traffic; where as I been looking at some SEO articles that direct traffic is one of the most important ranking factors. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Search traffic plummeting after HTTPS fumble - what to do now?
Hi all, Our website typically gets about 80% of our traffic from organic Google search over thousands of keywords (i.e., no single keyword (or group of) drives a large portion of our traffic). It's a nine year old website, and we have been growing steadily -- including about 30-40% year-over-year growth for the past 9-months. That is, up until Feb 2nd. On February 2nd, we switched to HTTPS. Everything was done per Google's recommendations: pages individually 301'd to HTTPS pages, no security warnings, added the new site in Webmaster Tools, etc. Google started to pick up our new site -- albeit 3 weeks into the transition, traffic was still significantly down. However, the big problem that we discovered was our ad revenues were getting destroyed. We're an ad based business and our CPMs were tanking, some of our ad partners were having problems serving ads, etc. We were losing a lot of money. So, we made the decision to reverse the HTTPS change and go back to HTTP. That was on Feb 22nd. Our traffic started to recover, and our ad rates did recover. However, 2-weeks after switching back -- March 8 -- our traffic started to fall and has continued to do so. Our traffic is now half of what it was a year ago, and only 1/3 of what it was before we made any changes. I am totally at a loss for what to do. I have spent endless hours digging through Webmaster Tools with no real insights. Here's the most I've been able to glean: Google picked up the new HTTPS site a lot faster than it has reverted back to the HTTP. Particularly for AMP pages. We had about 2,000 indexed AMP pages, which were quickly picked up when we switched to HTTPS, but since changing back to HTTP Google has been slow to re-index the HTTP. Only 935 AMP indexed pages now. According to Webmaster Tools, our overall ranking position has not been affected (the overall average). However, in a sampling of keywords I notice that a number of keywords seem to have been dropped completely from ranking, while others show the same rank position but Google seems to only be showing us in the results intermittently -- e.g., rank is unchanged, but impressions and clicks are much lower. I do not know what to do at this point, and sadly, I'm starting to get desperate for some help. I feel like all the hard work of almost a decade is slipping away and I have no idea how to change course. I've done absolutely everything I can think of from a technical standpoint. Am I being penalized for abandoning the switch to HTTPS? Should I now try and reverse course again, and switch BACK to HTTPS? Is this a temporary bobble that Google's algo will 'forget'? It's a super high quality website with long, unique, detailed articles. Not spammy and we have never had a manual action against us. I don't know what to do. Please help! Here's a link to the website. Thank you in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | tustind0 -
A web audit for web traffic? Need answers please..
Hi, We are a PR agency based in Dubai and we produce a lot of web content. The website is build on ruby on rails and we have implemented keywords and SEO strategies but sadly the traffic pattern has not changed since the past three years. What surprised us today that we created a page 2-3 days ago for a client who is participating in Arab Health (a very prestigious healthcare event) and suddenly our page comes on top 3 on google.ae as well as google.com We are kind of convinced that there is something wrong with our code.. Do you think this could be a possibility? and the lack of change in the traffic pattern might not be an SEO issue but a code issue? What could be the possible reasons for this pattern? In such a scenario what would experts like you recommend we do? Do a SEO Audit? Web audit? code audit? hire a seo/ web / code consultant? Thanks - helpful answers are really appreciated and just btw if anyone feels they could professionally help us out of this mess, we are willing to work with him/her. Thanks in advance
Algorithm Updates | | LaythDajani0 -
Penguin 3.0 Site Dropped after Update
Hi We was hit by the Penguin update a long time ago and we lost a lot of traffic/positions because of this. For a long time we worked really hard to identify all off our links that may have caused us to recieve this penalty. After Months of work we submitted the disavow file and reconsideration request and in June 2014 we recieved confirmation from google in webmaster tools that the manual spam action had been revoked. over time we then started to recieve more traffic and better positions in the serps, however since penguin 3.0 we have dropped again for a range of keywords. many going from page 1 to 2 or page 2 to 3/4 Any ideas what we should do here , any help will be really appriciated as I'm totally confused We havent done any link building at all since the penalty / recovery
Algorithm Updates | | AMG1000 -
Why does Google Alerts call my website a blog?
Our company started a WordPress blog about 14 years ago. It has since added a third-party forum, a user-submitted photo gallery, and a huge database of searchable products. We also have almost 4000 posts. With all that said, Google Alerts often lists our content under blogs rather than websites. Sometimes it shows up in both? Does anyone know what criteria Google uses for determining the type of content, and how we can signal to them that we are a website?
Algorithm Updates | | TMI.com0 -
Since authorship markup requires a domain email, how can a community website allow users to link their Google+ profile?
It seems that Google now requires authors to have a valid email on the domain. This is easy for the traditional web publication. But what about community websites like SEOmoz? How can a community website allow users to link their Google+ profile? Will community websites like SEOmoz be required to 1. Give all users a domain email 2. Ask users to validate the email address with Google? Seems overly complicated.
Algorithm Updates | | designquotes0 -
Yahoo/Bing cache date went back in time
Within 12 hours of submitting a new site to Yahoo/Bing webmasters it was ranking #3 for the primary homepage search term and in the top 5 for about a dozen other. On 7/23 the rankings were steady or climbing with the most recent cache date of 7/21. Now the site only comes up when searching for the domain name with a cache date of 7/11. I launched the site about 14 days ago so I am not expecting results yet but I had never seen this happen so I am just curious if anyone else had.
Algorithm Updates | | jafabel0