How to Evaluate Original Domain Authority vs. Recent 'HTTPS' Duplicate for Potential Domain Migration?
-
Hello Everyone,
So our site has used ‘http’ for the domain since the start. Everything has been set up for this structure and Google is only indexing these pages. Just recently a second version was created on ‘httpS’. We know having both up is the worst case scenario but now that both are up is it worth just switching over or would the original domain authority warrant just keeping it on ‘http’ and redirecting the ‘httpS’ version?
Assuming speed and other elements wouldn’t be an issue and it's done correctly.
Our thought was if we could do this quickly it would be easier to just redirect the ‘httpS’ version but was not sure if the Pros of ‘httpS’ would be worth the resources.
Any help or insight would be appreciated.
Please let us know if there are any further details we could provide that might help.
Looking forward to hearing from all of you!
Thank you in advance for the help.
Best,
-
Yes I would recommend moving to https over the curent http it will be very unlikely that you have an issue with google and The end-users will feel much more secure.
If you are doing this on a bespoke site ( not very common CMS or made by hand)
I know tools like letsencrypt.com give you a free certificate so will CloudFlare.com so if you're trying to have HTTP/2 , HSTS, forced https & a cert you can use for free version and it will do everything you need for https cost (free-$5,000) (any reverse proxy CDN or WAF) stackpath.com ($20) incapsula.com ($59) sucuri.net WAF ($19) Armor.com ($600-7,000) WAF only (under $200) Speedyrails.com has always had deals on cloudflare (35-40% off) if you're going to use it.
if you use a EV cert or just want to have a regular certificate I strongly recommend looking at third-party sites you can save a lot of money.
I like DigiCert and GlobalSign personal most of the others are on the Symantec what was VERISIGN you can definitely get away with getting one for $5-100 on namecheap but remember to search for the best price on Google.
They tend to make the job a lot easier and my personal opinion is that every person should actually do have WAF for their sites they like.
-
I'm happy to be of help!
-
You're welcome
-
Thank you both for the help, this is great. We were asking more in relation to choosing between which version to make the priority. It seems like you would recommend switching over to ‘https’ even though all of our pages being indexed are ‘http’? - Just wanted to make sure we understood you correctly.
We will make sure to go through all of the documentation you sent over before moving as well.
Please let us know if there is anything we could provide further details for that might help.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Thank you again for all the help.
Best,
-
This will help too
http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/search-engine-optimization/http-https-migration-checklist-google-docs/
& use http://www.aleydasolis.com/htaccess-redirects-generator/https-vs-http/
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]</ifmodule> -
As Romans stated you will need to go into search console and add all four properties. Then pick which one you want to be your canonical or Chosen URL.
-
On the Search Console Home page, click the site you want.
-
Click the gear icon, and then click Site Settings.
-
In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.
-
HTTP://
-
HTTPS://
** The to do list. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6332964**
** make certain that you force https:// on your hosting environment or WAF/CDN**
**Check it using a **Redirect mapper
- https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/
- If you get lost and need to fix something
- https://online.marketing/guide/https/
- https://www.deepcrawl.com/blog/news/2017-seo-tips-move-to-https/
Add HSTS once everything is definitely working.
Make sure everything is working correctly before Google crawls it use
all the best,
Tom
-
-
There is no a big deal, to avoid duplicate content just make the appropriate redirects, and register both properties on search console the 'http' and 'https' version and then set the right version on this case https.
Go to Search Console > Add a property > https version > Verify
then go Site settings and set the new version of your website, with those simple steps you will have everything up and running.
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
-
Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong?
Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong? Domain migration nightmare - what is wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PSOM1010 -
Http > https Switch Before Platform Migration?
We are planning a series of large site migrations over the next 12-18 months, moving from one platform to another. It's likely the first will be completed by around Aug this year, with the process running until the back end of 2018. The sites are currently on http, and the plan is to first of all migrate all sites to https in the next couple of months. The concern is that, due to the http>https 301 redirects that will be in place, are we putting ourselves at unnecessary risk by effectively carrying out 2 migrations in the space of a year (in terms of loss of potential authority caused by redirects)? Would we be better to wait, and implement https at point of platform migration instead? Thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers0 -
6 months Later - 0 Domain Authority/Page Authority and losing Rankings
Hi Moz, Sorry if this comes across as a "Do My Job For Me" type of post but we are an E-Commerce store that have been live since January but have not seen any increase in performance on our site and over the past month, have even seen our rankings decrease. We have 1300 products on site and about 1500 pages in total. 1. As for on-site optimization, we have got 2 reviews and follow up reviews with a highly reputable reviewer from People Per Hour and solved any issues she has found. 2. Updated the Meta Data for products and Alt Descriptions for images focusing on the keywords we wish to rank for. We post weekly blogposts linking back to our products. 3. Social Media Campaigns with regular campaigns on FaceBook, Pinterest, Google+ and Twitter. 4. Attempted to build FOLLOW backlinks to articles relating to products on our site. We have also considered purchasing backlinks to improve our situation as we have yet to see any of these pages be crawled by Google over a month later. I have read a guides on Moz and other sites on how to improve our authority and improve rankings but none have offered much by way of practical solution. My question being, is this just a matter of patience or should I be worried/improving anything given we have 0 Domain Authority and Page Authority on all pages? Thanking you in advance, SEO Novice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csworkwear0 -
Domain Authority
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone knew how to discover why DA may have dropped? Ours has gone from 26 to 25 - I know it's not much, but I wanted to find the reason. One thing which happened was our developer company wiped redirects, which did impact rankings - would this also have affected domain authority or do I need to review our backlinks again? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Duplicate content URLs from bespoke ecommerce CMS - what's the best solution here?
Hi Mozzers Just noticed this pattern on a retail website... This URL product.php?cat=5 is also churning out products.php?cat=5&sub_cat= (same content as product.php?cat=5 but from this different URL - this is a blank subcat - there are also unique subcat pages with unique content - but this one is blank) How should I deal with that? and then I'm seeing: product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 and product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000&cont_ref=giftselector (same content as product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 but from this different URL) How should I deal with that? This is a bespoke ecommerce CMS (unfortunately). Any pointers would be great 🙂 Best wishes, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
'Nofollow' footer links from another site, are they 'bad' links?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
one of my sites has about 1000 'nofollow' links from the footer of another of my sites. Are these in any way hurtful? Any help appreciated..0 -
Simple ways to boost Domain Authority
Hi, Any simple methods to boost Domain Authority? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Need to duplicate the index for Google in a way that's correct
Usually duplicated content is a brief to fix. I find myself in a little predicament: I have a network of career oriented websites in several countries. the problem is that for each country we use a "master" site that aggregates all ads working as a portal. The smaller nisched sites have some of the same info as the "master" sites since it is relevant for that site. The "master" sites have naturally gained the index for the majority of these ads. So the main issue is how to maintain the ads on the master sites and still make the nische sites content become indexed in a way that doesn't break Google guide lines. I can of course fix this in various ways ranging from iframes(no index though) and bullet listing and small adjustments to the headers and titles on the content on the nisched sites, but it feels like I'm cheating if I'm going down that path. So the question is: Have someone else stumbled upon a similar problem? If so...? How did you fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gustav-Northclick0