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
-
When domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
How Can I Redirect an Old Domain to Our New Domain in .htaccess?
There is an old version of http://chesapeakeregional.com still floating around the web here: http://www.dev3.com.php53-24.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/component/content/category/20-our-services. Various iterations of this domain pop up when I do certain site:searches and for some queries as well (such as "Diagnostic Center of Chesapeake"). About 3 months ago the websitetestlink site had files and a fully functional navigation but now it mostly returns 404 or 500 errors. I'd like to redirect the site to our newer site, but don't believe I can do that in chesapeakeregional.com's .htaccess file. Is that so and would I need access to the websitetestlink .htaccess to forward the domain? Note* I (nor anyone else in our organization) has the login for the old site. The new site went live about 9 months before I arrived at the organization and I've been slowly putting the pieces together since arriving.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smpomoryCRH0 -
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!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Any issue? Redirect 100's of domains into one website's internal pages
Hi all, Imagine if you will I was the owner of many domains, say 100 demographically rich kwd domains & my plan was to redirect these into one website - each into a different relevant subfolder. e.g. www.dewsburytilers..com > www.brandname.com/dewsbury/tilers.html www.hammersmith-tilers.com > www.brandname.com/hammersmith/tilers.html www.tilers-horsforth.com > www.brandname.com/horsforth/tilers.html another hundred or so 301 redirects...the backlinks to these domains were slim but relevant (the majority of the domains do not have any backlinks at all - can anyone see a problem with this practice? If so, what would your recommendations be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fergclaw0 -
Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27 There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.0 -
Does anyone know why my website's domain authority has dropped from 51 to 49
However this does not seem to be in isolation. All of my competitors websites have taken a similar 1 or 2 points hit. I am thinking that as an industry we may have been affected by a mutual linking site being taken down, redesigned or just loosing its own domain authority. We do rank well for our keywords and we have been on a continual rise since I took over in January, we do a little bit of a guest blogging and I am trying to build links to the site but I am doing it slowly. Would anyone else have an idea on what has happened that would cause 4 sites in the same industry to take a 1 or 2 point hit? Thanks, Emmet
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CertificationEU1 -
How does the crawl find duplicate pages that don't exist on the site?
It looks like I have a lot of duplicate pages which are essentially the same url with some extra ? parameters added eg: http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition?page=1 http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition?page=2 These extra 2 pages (and there's loads of pages this happens to) are a mystery to me. Not sure why they exist as there's only 1 page. Is this a massive issue? It's built on Drupal so I wonder if it auto generates these pages for some reason? Any help MUCH appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deniz0 -
Purchased a high ranking domain and want to transfer my site to the new domain
I recently purchased a highly ranked domain. The link profile is very good and I don't want to lose to many links however I want to transfer my site to that domain. What is the best way of doing this without losing the current rank on search engines? Also how much does the transfer of registrar information impact my SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydop0