Https Implementation - Weird Redirection After Putting 's' in http://
-
Hi Mozers,
I have come across some websites with their https version going to a totally different website.
For example, http://www.samplesite1.com will load fine but when the protocol is changed to https (https://www.samplesite1.com) it will go to a total different domain say, https://www.samplesite2.com
How does this happen, in technical sense?
In the warning from browser, it says the the security certificate is from the other website but I would like to understand how this happens and how it impacts SEO. I seem to be not able to understand the relationship of this error and SEO impact.
Thanks in advance for your response.
Malika
-
Thanks Chris Ashton for your response. Yes, I agree with you on the benefit bit. I dont think there is any sort of impact apart from confusing the users.
-
I can't say I've seen an instance of that happening before but chances are it's just being redirected via the htaccess file.
Through htaccess you can essentially say if the URL is prefaced with https://, redirect to the other domain.
As far as SEO benefits, there really are none that I'm aware of. Looking purely at rankings, the only value this will pass is ~90% of link juice from any links that explicitly point to the https version. From a legitimate SEO point of view (ie actually caring about users) it's more than likely going to give them a very confusing experience!
There are instances where it makes sense to push users to a https version and maybe a new subdomain or something (from www.store.com to https://www.store.website.com) but even then, there aren't too many instances where that would be ideal.
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
-
Google analytic's API information
I have multiple websites and instead of having to log in to each google analytics I want to create a dashboard inside my MIS that has the audience overview graph, is there any way to use API to do this? Is there a way to
Web Design | | BobAnderson0 -
Google is a definition engine / Question answering engine
But what do you do to rank when you sell a product and people don't have questions and none of the companies that rank on your keywords answers questions... Let me give you a few example. Title tag for example : People want to know what is it and then have question about it What is the maximum number of characters ? How do you write a good one ? Etc... How to remove stains is another example : Please want to know how to remove all the different types of stains, (ketchup, grease etc..) But what about when you are a online business and want to sell usb keys , rent bicycles https://www.spinlister.com or even sell a software to do A/B testing on your website https://bit.ly/2a6cBuF Can someone explain me how those people mentioned rank without giving definition or answering questions... because according to me they don't do any of that on the pages that I mentioned. I look forward to your reply. Thank you,
Web Design | | seoanalytics0 -
How long should an old site redirecting to a new site remain activated on a server?
Once I switch a site to a new domain (with links to corresponding/relative pages), will I have to keep the old site live forever for those links to work, or how long should I wait before I inactivate the old site on our server?
Web Design | | jwanner0 -
Best course of action when removing 100's of pages from your site?
We had a section on our site Legal News (we are a law firm). All we did there was rehash news stories from news sites (no original content). We decided to remove the entire Legal News section and we were left with close to 800 404's. Around this same time our rankings seemed to drop. Our webmaster implemented 301's to closely related content on our blog. In about a weeks time our rankings went back up. Our webmaster informed us that we should submit each url to Google for removal, which we did. Its been about three weeks and our Not Found errors in WMT is over 800 and seems to be increasing daily. Moz's crawler says we have only 35 404's and they are from our blog not the legal news section we removed. The last thing we want is to have another rankings drop. Is this normal? What is the best course of action when removing hundreds of pages from your site?
Web Design | | MFC0 -
What's the point of an EU site?
Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK 🙂 On this site http://www.milwaukeetool.eu/ the client wants to hold on to the EU site despite there being multiple standalone country sittes e.g. http://www.milwaukeetool.fr & http://www.milwaukeetool.co.uk Why would you ever need an EU site? I mean who ever searches for an EU site? If the client holds on to the eu site despite my position it's a waiste of time from a search perspective is the folowing the best appeasment? When a user enters the eu url or redirects to country the detected, eg I'm in Paris I enter www.milwaukeetool.eu it redirects to http://www.milwaukeetool.fr. My felling this would be the most pragmatic thing to do? Any ideas please,
Web Design | | Nightwing
Cioa,
David0 -
Random 302 Redirect (Wordpress CMS)
So this new project that i am working on is a redesigned CMS site using Wordpress (php based). Before i started on the project they made a few major updates that include: Changed from ID based URLS to SEO friendly URLS Added multiple languages in directories www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/fr www.domain.com/de etc... Due to the new languages they wanted to have the previous home page, www.domain.com, redirect to the proper language based on their IP address. Currently they are using a 301 redirect through a php header. So if i was visiting the site from my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio and i type www.domain.com into the browser. I would automatically redirect to www.domain.com/en and i would have the option to switch languages if needed. The issue: When i first added their site into SEOMoz the crawl returned a large amount of 302 redirects coming from their old homepage www.domain.com. So i took a look at the header calls using IE's webmaster tools and Firebug in Firefox. In both profilers it showed the same problem. Before the 301 header redirect there was a 302 redirect called first When viewing the response header it mentioned an x-pingback of some file that didn't even exist on the site: www.domain.com/xmlrpc.php This is obviously a huge issue because any link value from the old homepage will be lost due to the 302 not passing the value. I have tried search the almighty Google for help but it has gotten me no where. I have a hunch it is something to do with Wordpress but that is based on nothing but my gut. Any help is greatly appreciated. I got to get that 302 gone or changed to a 301 🙂 Regards - Kyle
Web Design | | kchandler0 -
Competitor Rockets to #1 and I'm looking at keyword stuffing. Will Google catch up with it?
We have a competitor whose home page rocketed up to number one, page one, on our key search term after they did a website redesign. They even beat out the original retailer for that position, as they are resellers of the product (not affiliate sales, resale in the secondary market.) They are the first to knock the original seller out of the #1 position. In the past couple of years that I have been doing in-house SEO, they have never ranked on page one for the term. I ran their site through the SEOmoz page grader for the specific search term, loading their page that is ranking, and found that they grade a “B,” but have some alerts for keyword stuffing, (the search term is on the home page 30+ times,) and they have eleven tags on said page. Aside from the two things listed above, they have pretty good site architecture on this new site, and are pretty well branded, etc. Should I expect Google to catch the keyword stuffing and eleven tags, and possibly adjust their rank? Will their keyword stuffing come back to bite them?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Do you have an SEO 'plugin' recommendation for SharePoint 2007?
I'm not a programmer and our 200+ person company isn't going to change their CMS just because I asked them nicely. Do you know of any SEO plugin I can use on SharePoint 2007? I just don't want to have to keep going into each of 110 websites time after time.
Web Design | | DaveGerecht0