Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. On-Page Optimization
    4. Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?

    On-Page Optimization
    4
    4
    3171
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Aquatell
      Aquatell last edited by

      My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform.  We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https.  Only our shopping cart is using https protocol.  We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version.  What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version.  And the https version is always better.  Example:  http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27.  Can somebody please help me make sense of this?  Thanks,

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • evolvingSEO
        evolvingSEO last edited by

        Laurie

        It should be clarified that Moz's Domain Authority, while a really solid metric, is not the metric Google has or uses. And domain authority can have a few artificial quirks. So I would not be alarmed at all.

        That said - can you explain where you are seeing the two different number? I see a Page Authority of 39 for both http and https - and I see a domain authority of 27 for both http and https.

        Now, even IF Moz has two different numbers for http and https, again, this is not what Google is doing, it's just an approximation.

        Setting a canonical from https to http is just a band-aid and I would not recommend that approach. I would recommend having a site-wide 301 redirect so if a user lands on the https version of a URL it redirects them to the same version of that page on http. Or vice vera, whichever version you are prioritizing.

        I have to respectfully disagree with Dmytro and Robert - as mentioned, Moz's metrics are not Google metrics - and the best action here is always to prioritize http or https with redirects.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • RobCairns
          RobCairns last edited by

          Hi Laurie,

          Absolutely - the answer is actually more simple than you might think. Google has explicitly stated that HTTPS is a ranking factor and benefits the domain more than HTTP. Check out this post on the Moz Blog by Cyrus Sheppard:

          https://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2015

          I will quote from the blog itself:

          "While page length, hreflang use, and total number of links all show moderate association with Google rankings, we found that using HTTPS has a very low positive correlation. This could indicate it's the "tie-breaker" Google claims."

          Here's a link to the actual survey data:

          https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

          Basically, HTTPS is a tie-breaker system set up whereby if all else remains the same, a site using HTTPS will beat out a site using HTTP in the SERPs.

          This is perfectly expressed in your data.

          Hope this helps to make sense of the situation and let me know if you need anything else,

          Rob

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • solvid
            solvid last edited by

            Hi,

            It seems like Google might be treating http and https as 2 different websites. Have you specified the preffered website version in your Search Console?

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • sarahwalsh

              On-page SEO

              onpage

              This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?

              On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh
              1
            • jafarfahi

              How Removing Zombie pages effect on domain authority?

              Hi. Recently I got a project (removing zombie pages here: https://www.alamto.com/ ) As you can see this site has about 20k indexed page on google and it seems I should remove about 6000 useless indexed page. does removing (Noindex) these pages affect on the site metrics? Which metrics would affected? and how? Thanks.

              On-Page Optimization | | jafarfahi
              1
            • GhillC

              Impact of keyword/keyphrases density on header/footer

              Hi, It might be a stupid question but I prefer to clear things out if it's not a problem: Today I've seen a website where visitors are prompted no less than 5 times per page to "call [their] consultants".
              This appears twice on the header, once on the side bar (mouse over pop up), once in the body of most of the pages and once in the footer. So obviously, besides the body of the pages, it appears at least 4 times on every single pages as it's part of the website template. In the past, I never really wondered re the menu, the footer etc as it's usually not hammering the same stuff repeatedly everywhere. Anyway, I then had a look at their blog and, given the average length of their articles, the keyword density around these prompts is about 0.5% to 0.8% for each page. This is huge! So basically my question is as follow: is Google's algorithm smart enough to understand what this is and make abstraction of this "content" to focus on the body of the pages (probably simply focusing on the tags)? Or does it send wrong signals and confuse search engine more than anything else? Reading stuff such as this, I wonder how does it work when this is not navigational or links elements. Thanks,
              G Note: I’m purposely not speaking about the UX which is obviously impacted by such a hammering process.

              On-Page Optimization | | GhillC
              0
            • Deluxe

              Will it upset Google if I aggregate product page reviews up into a product category page?

              We have reviews on our product pages and we are considering averaging those reviews out and putting them on specific category pages in order for the average product ratings to be displayed in search results. Each averaged category review would be only for the products within it's category, and all reviews are from users of the site, no 3rd party reviews. For example, averaging the reviews from all of our boxes products pages, and listing that average review on the boxes category page. My question is, will this be doing anything wrong in the eyes of Google, and if so how so? -Derick

              On-Page Optimization | | Deluxe
              0
            • RonnieT

              Each page with a different meta description?

              each page on my website represents a different department, can I program the header to show a different meta description on each page or should there only be 1 meta description tag per domain?

              On-Page Optimization | | RonnieT
              0
            • Ron_McCabe

              Any idea how Google is doing this? Is it schematic? http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/28/google-adds-full-restaurant-menus-to-its-search-results-pages/

              Google is now showing menus on select searches.  Any idea how they are getting this information? I would like to make sure my clients get visibility this way.

              On-Page Optimization | | Ron_McCabe
              0
            • rsigg

              Noindex child pages (whose content is included on parent pages)?

              I'm sorry if there have been questions close to this before... I've using WordPress less like a blogging platform and more like a CMS for years now... For content management purposes we organize a lot of content around Parent/Child page (and custom-post-type) relationships; the Child pages are included as tabbed content on the Parent page. Should I be noindexing these child pages, since their content is already on the site, in full, on their Parent pages (ie. duplicate content)? Or does it not matter, since the crawlers may not go to all of the tabbed content? None of the pages have shown up in Moz's "High Priority Issues" as duplicate content but it still seems like I'm making the Parent pages suffer needlessly... Anything obvious I'm not taking into consideration? By the by, this is my first post here @ Moz, which I'm loving; this site and the forums are such a great resource! Anyways, thanks in advance!

              On-Page Optimization | | rsigg
              0
            • ribandhull

              How do I get other pages to show in SERPs

              Why is it that when you google a domain like yahoo.com you sometimes get a main SERP and 6 sub SERPs below it. This concerns the 1st position.

              On-Page Optimization | | ribandhull
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.