Transfering Site from Http to HTTPS
-
Migrating all of our pages from HTTP to HTTPS. I am listing few of my concerns regarding the same:
- Currently, all HTTPS traffic to our Homepage and SEO page is 301 Redirected to HTTP equivalent. So, when we enable HTTPS on all our pages and 301 all HTTP traffic to HTTPS and stop current 301 Redirection to HTTP, will it still cause a loop during Google crawl due to old indexing?
- Will we move whole SEO facing site to HTTPS at once or will it be in phases? Which of the two approach is better keeping SEO in mind?
- what all SEO changes will be required on all pages.(eg. Canonical URLs on our website as well as affiliate websites), sitemaps etc.
-
Where the issue becomes more complex, is if you add CloudFlare to your site for DDoS protection, to serve up from closer towers, etc. Many sites who want to load faster or avoid attack are doing so. We have thus incurred a redirect issue to work through and it takes some technical expertise. Because CloudFlare is a third party for SSL certificates in many hosting packages, this seems to catch many off-guard and wondering what went wrong.
If helpful, we have had greater success buying our own CloudFlare service versus letting a hosting provider be an affiliate service for our SSL.
-
Hi Robin,
I just went through this and here is my $0.02...
1. You will need to basically reverse your 301 redirect, so that http redirects to https, instead of how you have it set now. This should be no problem, just update .htaccess and reverse it. If you are using Wordpress, you'll need to set your site URL in the general settings tab and go verify all the permalinks update to https. You won't get a redirect chain unless you have http pointing to https and then https pointing back to http. Just use one 301, and you should be fine.
2. I would move the whole thing at once. It'll be a lot simpler than trying to segregate which pages are http and which are https.
3. You won't need canonicals because of the 301. Google will see that you are permanently redirecting all your pages to https. Another likely canonical situation; if you have another website using an article that you published first, and they are pointing to the same article on your website as the canonical, it'll hit the redirect and not split the link juice.
4. The tracking URL's won't change, and you can verify this by logging in to Analytics and Search Console. The one thing you'll need to do in Search Console is "add a property" for the https:// and the https://www versions of your website. You'll then need to make sure you have the preferred domain selected. Then you can resubmit your sitemap.xml files and you should be good to go.
I hope this helps
-
Hey.
No, it's not a new property. No need in my opinion. Let's see if others see otherwise, but I never do this.
For the first - It won't cause a loop. Just make sure to set all links to https. If you run WP - install a plugin called something like "simply http to https" if you don't have the coding skills or a dev team to handle the migration properly. It's a clean solution.
Cheers
-
Can u answer me little more deeply and technically about the first point with I had asked. Since I'm not having a clear idea with it.
Also in google analytics, should I add the new https url under Admin>Property Settings?
-
Hey there,
1. Google won't be affected, no worries.
2. I'd recommend moving the whole thing.
3. All you need to do is make sure that all internal links (from / toold posts/categories/etc) will now be set to https so they don't redirect from http to https.
4. GA code remains
5. No. Just tell G to reindex when you're ready.
Good luck!
-
Also please explain what all things to do with Google Analytics and Google Webmasters.
1. Google Analytics Tracking code will remains the same?
2. Need to submit the new https version URL on google webmasters?
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 Sites website https://www.opcfitness.com/ title NOT GOOD FOR SEO
We set up a website https://www.opcfitness.com/home on google sites. but google sites page title not good for SEO. How to fix it?
Technical SEO | | ahislop5740 -
Http:// vs Https:// in Og:URL
Hi, Recently, we have migrated our website from http:// to https://. Now, every URL is in https:// and we have used 301 permanent redirection for redirecting OLD URL's to New Ones. We have planned to include http:// link in og:url instead of https:// due to some social share issues we are facing. My concern is, if Google finds the self http:// URL on every page of my blog, will Google gets confused with http and https:// as we are providing the old URL to Google for crawling. Please advice. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia0 -
Moving to https
Hi all and thanks for taking the time to read my question. We are going to migrate a very small website from http to https, its a roughly 9 page site with 5 of those being product pages. I figured I would have to set a canonical and permanent 301 redirects for each page. But our tech guys suggested just doing a binding to https so any traffic hitting our site with a http url would automatically get redirected to the https version. So if someone land on http://mydomain, it would automatically return https://mydomain Does this sound correct or would we need to do additional tasks even if we go down the binding route?thanks again for looking.
Technical SEO | | Renford_Nelson1 -
Http to https - is a '302 object moved' redirect losing me link juice?
Hi guys, I'm looking at a new site that's completely under https - when I look at the http variant it redirects to the https site with "302 object moved" within the code. I got this by loading the http and https variants into webmaster tools as separate sites, and then doing a 'fetch as google' across both. There is some traffic coming through the http option, and as people start linking to the new site I'm worried they'll link to the http variant, and the 302 redirect to the https site losing me ranking juice from that link. Is this a correct scenario, and if so, should I prioritise moving the 302 to a 301? Cheers, Jez
Technical SEO | | jez0000 -
How to remove a thin site penalty
Wondering if anyone could help out. A while back I made an affiliate store using wordpress and merchants products feeds. I didn't get found to adding any unique content to the site and, as was to be expected, I gained a penalty and my search traffic died. A few months back I redesigned the store, still using merchant csv but now with 98% unique content on each page. However, try as I may I still cannot get anywhere in the engines. The domain doesn't even rank for it's own name!! I have submitted reconsideration request but they have replied saying no penalty on the site. The domain is www.digitalcatwalk.co.uk. While the domain isn't massively strong I would prefer not to have to start again as I feel it is a very good domain name. Any advise would be most gratefully received. Thanks Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Trying to get google to know my site is a magazine site is this wrong
Hi, i have put a line to describe what my site is at the top of my site and i want to know if this is wrong or not. We have dropped frok being number one in google for lifestyle magazine to now number seven. Before we had to redo our site we were number one and then we dropepd to around number four when we finished the site and now we are number seven and i need to try and get back up there. To help google know we are a lifestyle magazine i have put a line at the top of the site and i want to know if this looks out of place and if i should take it down. i need advice on how to get google to know we are a lifestyle magazine and get back in the top five of google my site is www.in2town.co.uk any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How do you diagnose if on your site is only 50% crawled?
Good Morning from 7 degrees C, goodbye arctic conditions wetherby UK, If a site had 100 pages for example & that site was plugged into Webmaster Tools how could you diagnose if all the pages had been crawled? The thing is I want to learn how to diagnose crawl issues with sites, is their a known methodology for this? Thanks in advance, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Impact of 401s on Site Rankings
Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)
Technical SEO | | Christy-Correll0