Https redirect
-
Hi there,
a client of mine is asking me if Google would penalize to redirect from all the http urls to https (they want to change the security protocol).
I assume it is going to work as a classic 301, right? so they might lose some authority in they way, but I am not 100% sure. Can anyone confirm this? does anyone has a similar experience?
thanks a lot!
-
Hi Michael,
What did you and the client end up deciding? Do you have any lessons learned or anything interesting to share? We'd love to hear it!
-
Do all the pages need to be https or just some of them? I'm not a huge fan of working with all https sites, but appreciate sometimes it's necessary.
Some things you may want to look at - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/solving-duplicate-content-issues-with-http-and-https
As with any redirect you're losing some juice, but if it needs to be done it should just be the same as a normal redirect. This should be safe:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]I never see many top sites using https exclusively, even paypal has it's http version in the SERPs (though redirects you to the https immediately) because nobody links to the https version. Well, not nobody, but you get what I mean, nobody immediately thinks to put that 's' in there so there's lots of links to the http version.
Both are fine to use though.
-
If the 301 redirection is correctly implemented (a 301 redirection for each single http page to the https page), this should be OK. From a theorical point of view, you may loss around ~10% of the linkjuice from existing backlinks. However, I personally never noticed a negative impact of my rankings on this kind of massive website redirection.
Here are a just few things I would recommend you pay attention to:
- Make 100% sure you correctly implement your 301 redirections.
- Once you've correctly implemented your 301 redirections, submit an XML sitemap of your old URLs (starting with standard http://) to ask Google to recrawl your old URLs and see that they have been 301-redirected to https://* URLs. This will make Google update its index more quickly.
- Also make sure your https website doesn't require resources (such as images, javascripts, css files) that are not served in https. If your HTTPS pages require resources served in HTTP, Internet Explorer will popup a warning message asking for the user if he wants to display resources which are not secured.
My two cents.
J.
-
Switching to https by using a 301 redirect will probably cause a temporary dip in traffic, but this should only be temporary.
It would make sure that you use a "rel=canonical" tag on the pages just to be clear to Google that the HTTPS version is what you want users to see.
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
-
301 redirects for all urls - legal dispute
The website in question is a very high traffic website with substantial credibility in it's subject matter (sorry, can't share more details) that delivers an overwhelming majority of traffic from SEO, much of which is new visitors. A legal dispute has resulted in both parties agreeing to forward a percentage of the total URLs to alternative websites (only 1 website for each party). All URLs for the domain will be forwarded elsewhere. It does not make sense to me that the "sum of the parts" will be as strong once the redirects are implemented but I am looking for feedback. It is fair to say that the alternative domains of each party are no where near as strong as the domain being "parted out." Will the SEO juice be distributed to each domain in full? Will both parties lose out substantially? Feel free to ask for clarifications and I'll do the best I can given the legal parameters. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ReachMaineAgency0 -
301 redirect of a subdirectory
Hello! I am working on a website with the following structure: example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. The page "example.com/sub1" does not exist (I know this is not the optimal architecture to have this be a nonexistent page). But someone might type that address, so I would like it to redirect it to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. I tried the following redirect: redirect 301 /sub1 http://example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. But with this redirect in place, if I go to example.com/sub1, I get redirected to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3/sub2/sub3 (the redirect just inserts extra subdirectories). If someone types "example.com/sub1" into a browser, I would "example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3" to come up. Is this possible? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
301 redirects reverting to 302 redirects
We recently built a new website with a new site structure. To prevent there being a load of 404's I redirected the old pages to the new relevant pages with 301 redirects. A few days later the SEOmoz crawl report alerted me to a load of 302 redirects. When I looked into this for some reason all of the 301 redirects I set up are reverting to 302 redirects. I did a test by 301 redirecting a made up URL to an existing page and the same thing happens - it 302 redirects. I can't find any settings in WordPress to possibly explain why this is happening. Has anyone got any ideas why this could be?
Technical SEO | | Tone_Agency0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Does HTTPS Only make a impact on SEO?
Hi. I run a site that's SSL only. (Using a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from http:// to https://). This might be a stupid question but i can't seem to find any conclusive answers to the question by searching. Does this negatively affect the search engine ranking of the site? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Host1
Eivind1 -
301 Redirect Issue
I'm having an issue with 301 redirects: Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one... So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense? The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog." Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!! Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | EntrustSEO0 -
301 redirect on the root of the site
Due to some historic difficulties with our URL Rewriter, we are in the position of having the root of our site 301 redirected to another page. So the root of our site: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/ has a 301 redirect to: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/home.aspx We're aware that this isn't great and we're working to fix this completely, but what impact will this have on our SEO?
Technical SEO | | LianWard860 -
Query String Redirection
In PHP, I'm wanting to store a session variable based upon a link that's clicked. I'm wanting to avoid query strings on pages that have content. My current workaround is to have a link with query strings to a php file that does nothing but snags the variables via $_GET, stores them into $_SESSION, and then redirects. For example, consider this script, that I have set up to force to a mobile version. Accessed via something like a href="forcemobile.php?url=(the current filename)" session_start(); //Location of vertstudios file on your localhost. Include trailing slash $loc = "http://localhost/web/vertstudios/"; //If GET variable not defined, this page is being accessed directly. //In that case, force to 404 page. Same case for if mobile session variable //not defined. if(!(isset($_GET["url"]) && isset($_SESSION["mobile"]))){ header("Location: http://www.vertstudios.com/404.php"); exit(); } //Snag the URL $url = $_GET["url"]; //Set the mobile session to true, and redirect to specified URL $_SESSION["mobile"] = true;header("Location: " . $loc . $url); ?> Will this circumvent the issue caused by using query strings?
Technical SEO | | JoeQuery0