Fundamental HTTP to HTTPS Redirect Question
-
Hi All
I'm planning a http to https migration for a site with over 500 pages. The site content and structure will be staying the same, this is simply a https migration.
Can I just confirm the answer to this fundamental question?
From my reading, I do not need to create 301 redirect for each and every page, but can add a single generic redirect so that all http references are redirected to https. Can I just double check this would suffice to preserve existing google rankings?
Many Thanks
-
Hi Sean / Others
Can I just add one last question to this post?
I'm not certain about the canonical tags. Although I don't need to add redirects for everypage, do I need to add a canonical tag to each page?
Is there a way of doing this for all pages?
-
Awesome, thank you so much!
-
Hi Sean
Thank you so much, that is brilliant much appreciated.
I'm new to this forum, just to double check I've ticked the thumbs up and also "good answer", I think that show the appreciation that you can on this forum?
-
Hi there!
You're absolutely correct, you would just need a domain-level server redirect to take all http URLs to their https equivalent.
Best practice is to ensure you've also got the non-www. version of the website covered in that same redirect too, to avoid any chains. You'll see what I mean if you run your domain through this > https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/
Depending on what stack you're using, here are the 2 guides. One for htaccess and one for IIS:
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10489895/http-to-https-through-htaccess
- https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kaushal/2013/05/22/http-to-https-redirects-on-iis-7-x-and-higher/
You shouldn't need to, but just to be on the safe side, I would also add canonical tags to the http pages, pointing to their https equivalent prior to putting the server level redirect in place. This is to ensure that you won't be causing yourself issues if the redirect fails for any reason. Details here:
Once you've got your redirection planned in, make sure you set up a Google Search Console account for the https version to ensure there are no crawl issues and to check that the http version of the site stops receiving traffic.
That should just about cover it!
Hope it all goes well,
Sean
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
Looking for the best way to do the following. Business has changed its name, and has also become a corporate store. The old domain name is now no longer needed as a website page has been created inside the main corporate site. Obviously i dont want to loose all the traffic that we had and want to redirect them but there is a problem, that im unable to redirect the old domain to the new one due to office 365 installed on the hosting platform, and the old emails will need to run for another 6 months. I can remove the old site and put a landing page up, but i still need to redirect all the pages to the new site, and there is approx 50+ of them. My main question is i currently have atleast 50+ redirects already in there due to seo changes over the years, some would go back atleast 5 years, whats a safe amount of time that i can remove the older redirects And am i going about this the right way so i dont loose all the hard work on rankings etc
Technical SEO | | Dunjoko0 -
Drupal, http/https, canonicals and Google Search Console
I’m fairly new in an in-house role and am currently rooting around our Drupal website to improve it as a whole. Right now on my radar is our use of http / https, canonicals, and our use of Google Search Console. Initial issues noticed: We serve http and https versions of all our pages Our canonical tags just refer back to the URL it sits on (apparently a default Drupal thing, which is not much use) We don’t actually have https properties added in Search Console/GA I’ve spoken with our IT agency who migrated our old site to the current site, who have recommended forcing all pages to https and setting canonicals to all https pages, which is fine in theory, but I don’t think it’s as simple as this, right? An old Moz post I found talked about running into issues with images/CSS/javascript referencing http – is there anything else to consider, especially from an SEO perspective? I’m assuming that the appropriate certificates are in place, as the secure version of the site works perfectly well. And on the last point – am I safe to assume we have just never tracked any traffic for the secure version of the site? 😞 Thanks John
Technical SEO | | joberts0 -
Redirects for new website
Hi Moz community,
Technical SEO | | JSimmons17
I'm a fairly new SEO Specialist with a brand new website. We initially had a very basic holding website until the fully functional website was completed. I have to do some redirects as we have both .html and .php files & we don't want to lose SEO value for specific pages (like the index, news, etc). I also want to redirect from a www url to a non-www url. I am trying to accomplish redirects with the following code: RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mywebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://mywebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] RedirectMatch 301 /index.html (.*).(php|html) http://mywebsite.com/index.php RedirectMatch 301 /cupcakes-slideshow/glutenfree-slideshow.html (.*).(php|html) http://mywebsite.com/gluten-and-glutenfree.php RedirectMatch 301 /press.html (.*).(php|html) http://mywebsite.com/news-and-reviews.php Please let me know if I am on the right track. Thanks so much in advance!0 -
Wordpress and Redirects?
I want to update my permalinks - actually I want to change the URL's to fit the content and keywords better. I can choose "edit" the URL, but don't I need a redirect? I don't see any htaccess Plugin installed.......is that what I need to be able to change my URL's in Wordpress?
Technical SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Redirecting a questionable domain to a trusted domain
I have a question!
Technical SEO | | FDFPres
We have 2 domains operating within the same retail sector. One of them is for our bricks and mortar business and the other is a new brand we launched as a nationwide e-retailer. We aggressively built links for the new one and achieved some very good search positioning, where we remained for about 4 months until the google updates of the first half of this year started biting. The domain never received a warning from google or anything, but the links have clearly been devalued to a point where the domain is now virtually buried for the most competitive terms. However, the domain does still get around 100-200 visitors per day, and has a DA of 38. We're thinking about a reshuffle that would involve putting the products in to our brick and mortar business website, and redirecting the brand domain to the bricks and mortar domain. Thank you for reading this far! the question is then, is there a danger of the bricks and mortar domain being tarnished by this? as i said the brand domain hasn't had any notices of penalty from google but it has definitely been hit by updates.0 -
User Reviews Question
On my e-commerce site, I have user reviews that cycle in the header section of my category pages. They appear/cycle via a snippet of code that the review program provided me with. My question is...b/c the actual user-generated content is not in the page content does the google-bot not see this content? Does it not treat the page as having fresh content even though the reviews are new? Does the bot only see the code that provides the reviews? Thanks in advance. Hopefully this question is clear enough.
Technical SEO | | IOSC0 -
Domain tld question
Hi all, I have a question regarding the ranking of exact match tld which is co.uk Currently I have a .com domain with PR of 3 and the problem is that it have one word in front of my desired keyword, so it's not exact match. I have managed to buy an exact match but it's co.uk The questions are: Will a co.uk rank better for UK than .com domain I am reading at SEOMOZ that exact match domain value is getting lower, so is it worth to redirect my current .com domain to co.uk just to get rid of that one word and start all over again with exact match. Thanks
Technical SEO | | VasilTasev0 -
Advises for redirects
I worked on a website since 2 years now (mainly link building). Now, I need to change the CMS and the hosting company of this website. In order to improve the SEO of this website, I decided to change the URL structure as well, see example here below: Actual situation: http://www.mywebsite.com
Technical SEO | | Tit
http://walla.mywebsite.com/
http://ortak.mywebsite.com/ http://www.mywebsite.com/de
http://walla.mywebsite.com/de
http://ortak.mywebsite.com/de http://www.mywebsite.com/es
http://walla.mywebsite.com/es
http://ortak.mywebsite.com/es Future situation: http://www.mywebsite.com
http://www.mywebsite.com/walla
http://www.mywebsite.com/ortak http://www.mywebsite.com/es
http://www.mywebsite.com/es/walla
http://www.mywebsite.com/es/ortak http://www.mywebsite.com/de
http://www.mywebsite.com/de/walla
http://www.mywebsite.com/de/ortak Since the hosting, the CMS and the URL’s will change, what you recommend me to do in order to keep a maximum of “link juice” to the pages!? How / Where to setup the 301 redirects?0