HTTPS website migration and internal links
-
Hey Moz!
I read Moz's guide on migrating websites from http to https, and it seems changing all relative internal links to absolute https is recommended (we currently use relative internal links). But is doing this absolutely necessary if we will already have a redirect in our .htaccess file forcing all http pages to https?
Changing all of our internal links to absolute https will be very time consuming, and I'd like to hear your thoughts as to whether it's absolutely recommended/necessary; and if so, why?
Thanks!
-
I didn't think so, but wanted to double check.
Regarding redirects, will I have to change old 301 redirects in our .htaccess file that are setup for individual pages from http to https? Or will the site wide redirect take care of this?
Thanks!
-
As far as I know - no, they dont' support it yet (weird, I know). It does say it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
Note: The tool does not currently support the following kinds of site moves: subdomain name changes, protocol changes (from HTTP to HTTPS), or path-only changes.
-
Another question just popped into my head!
Does the Google WMT "Change of Address" tool still not support https?
-
Thanks for the info!
Does anyone else have experience with the issues I raised above? I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts too.
-
Yes, i believe so.
-
I honestly can't remember, as I started the research months ago and the project had to be put on hold.
I do know that Moz recommends the following: "Make sure every element of your website uses HTTPS, including widgets, java script, CSS files, images and your content delivery network."
Will the redirect I posted above take care of this?
-
Yeah, it looks right to me. Can you send me articles where you found people recommending absolute links for https?
-
Hey Dmitrii,
Thanks for the response...you seem to be everywhere in the Q&A!
As far as I understand the redirect below would make it impossible for users to reach our http website, which means we wouldn't have to change our relative internal links, correct? Keep in mind, the rewrite below may look a bit different since our website uses a load balancer.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.jwsuretybonds.com$1 [R=301,L]
-
Hi there.
No it's not necessary at all. The reason it's recommended sometimes is that, basically, to eliminate potential extra redirects from http to https. But this would happen only if page you're currently on is not https. So, my thought is that as long as you make sure that there is no way to get to your http website (make sure that it's always redirected to https), you won't have any extra redirects.
From my personal experience: it depends also on hosting servers you use. If they are very slow or you have gigantic htaccess files or something in that spirit, then yes, couple extra redirects to secure version of your website can slowdown page loading on your website. But in modern world it's very rare. So, from dozens of https clients and my own websites I haven't seen any bad-bad experience with relative internal links.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Any Website SEO Benefits from SAAS Linked Content?
An installed software application has a help section for users, and that help content is housed on the software company website. Would the links from the software application to the company website benefit the websites SEO efforts? Or, would no referring URL mean no SEO value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sysprousa1
Thanks!0 -
Can I define that one area of my website is a regualr news (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read?
Hi I have a client that have a news website, he asked me if he can define one area of his website to be a regular news that google can show on google news search results (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Rankings drop after https migration [Need urgent help]
hey hi guys, i have lost all my organic traffic and in need of urgent help. Plz i need all your SEO expertise. My website is: makemoneyadultcontent.com (before judging me, let me tell you that i have been in adult industry for almost 7 years now and hence this blog was a way to pass my knowledge to everyone who is looking for it) Recently i saw that moving to HTTPS will benefit my site. I did not knew much about technical details of moving to https. My hosting was on siteground, and they have a button which you can press and your website will then be served through https. So i did that. Nothing else was done. this was done on 13th or 14th of june For the next few weeks here is my analytics (image attached) : As you can see the traffic fluctuated and finally i lost everything on 29th june. When i researched more, i found out that you need to follow many steps in order to move to HTTPS. So i followed this guide and completed all the steps: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/http-to-https/ (also checked many other guides and tried to complete all the steps mentioned) Everyone said that the rankings will recover in one week, but now it has been more than 17 days and still the rankings have not improved. My articles are indexed as i can see it using site:makemoneyadultcontent.com but none of them are ranking for the keywords that i was ranking earlier. i have submitted the sitemap in google webmaster and around 166 (out of 218) pages are indexed. Here are few more images to help my case: plz plz help me what i can do to get my website traffic back. i have spent a lot of time and effort in building this site, cant see it die a slow death like this one. 8Wa8c [http ahref](http ahref) D42xw sAd9E
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | akki910 -
International website. Di I need a new website
i am looking to expand from the UK and open a location in the US. i curretly have a .co.uk domain. what would you recommend I do with th website, create a new one wth a .com domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Linking to own homepage with keywords as link text
I recently discovered, that previous SEO work on a client's website apparently included setting links from subpages to the homepage using keywords as link text that the whole website should rank for. i.e. (fictional example) a subpage about chocolate would link to the homepage via "Visit the best sweet shop in Dallas and get a free sample." I am dubious about the influence this might have - anybody with any tests? I also think that it is quite weird when considering user friendliness - at least I would not expect such a link to take me to the homepage of the very site I was just on, probably browsing in a relevant page. So, what about such links: actually helpful, mostly don't matter or even potentially harmful? Looking forward to your opinions! Nico
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Our website is not being indexed
We have an issue with a site that we can't get to the bottom of. This site: (URL removed) is not being properly indexed. When we do a search for (URL removed) in google.com.au. The site appears as the 4th listing with the following title and description: (Title removed) A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We have checked the site's robots.txt and can see its been now implemented correctly: (URL removed) About a week ago, we also went into Webmaster Tools and submitted a request for Google to recrawl our site. We are unsure what the issue is that is causing the site to not be properly indexed and how to resolve it. Any assistance on this topic would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Is CDN Good For International Website?
Hello - Which solution is better For International Website: 1) using a CDN, or 2) using some VPS's in each location?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahid-af0 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0