Can converting a site to HTTPS impact ranking?
-
We have a client with a very large site that would like to put a login on each page; however, that would require the entire site be put behind a secure connection (changing http:// to https:// on every page). They rank for a ton of keywords and rank well. Would the change impact their rankings at all? Could it possibly help them?
-
Hi Cyrus,
No - all the content will still be visible. We just want to migrate to https. Thanks for the advice!
-
Not at all, Martin! They just didn't answer the original question of whether or not there would be an impact.
-
Thanks for adding that Cyrus... I have to say I was assuming Douglas wasn't hiding the actual content, but that was an assumption, so I'm glad you checked.
-
Hi Douglas,
Martin has some good points on how to implement the migration to https, but I want to make sure that you're only adding a login on each page, and not putting your content behind the login. You're content is visible even if a user is logged out, right?
If it's just a form, then you're okay. You might lose a little link juice via 301 redirects, but in general you'll be fine.
On the other hand, if you require a login to your content, this is a really bad idea.Search robots don't fill out login forms. When they get to one, they stop. There are no more links at this point for them to crawl. This can and does create severe crawling and indexing for websites that employ this technique.
Otherwise, if you follow Martins advice you should come out quite alright. Once you implement the 301s, I might leave the old sitemap in place for awhile (and submit both to the major search engines) so that Google can process the 301s.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Hi Doug,
And I did not presume you could or couldn't do those things, but I didn't word my post in a way that was condescending...explaining things step by step is not always appropriate because I would rather presume knowledge on a forum like SEOmoz than presume ignorance.
So, I hope you were not too offended by my presumption of knowledge.
That being said would you like me to explain what to do to achieve the above points? I am more than happy to do so, by the way.
- On the volume of links - if it is a large-scale issue then another solution would be to have a non-SSL version home page, but on login they are taken to a different SSL 'member welcome' or 'dashboard' sort of page. That way you can retain the link value to the non-SSL version while providing the necessary security over the logged-in functionality.
- On the question of non-SSL links to SSL page ... any extra 'diversion' required between a link and its target has, in my experience, the propensity to reduce that link's effectiveness. even the effects of 301's diminish over time because the presumption is that the page you are 301-ing to is the correct 'new' one and is therefore more relevant, which is why I initially suggested getting links 'fixed'. As your initial post did not suggest the scale of links I could not have replied in a more precise way.
So I do suggest you consider implementing the first bullet point above as a good compromise and will retain the value of your links but permits the SSL implementation as well.
Let me know if I can help further or if you need more things explaining so that you know how to go about doing some of the things suggested. Thanks.
-
Hmmm... of course if I could do all of those things, I probably wouldn't have asked the question. Sarcasm aside, there are tens of thousands of links external to the site, many of them on very high authority sites that will not update their links.
Are you saying that a non-SSL link to an SSL page will actually diminish the backlink's weight?
Doug
-
Right, one of our clients fits this bill exactly. So here goes:-
- Do a 301 redirect of all impacted URLs in the .htaccess or web.config file (depending on the type of server)
- Ensure the sitemap.xml contains the HTTPS versions only.
- Find out who's linking to your pages and using the HTTP and ask them to update the link to https
- Do a double check of all internal links (which should have relative paths anyway) and make sure none refer to HTTP
If you do it well it shouldn't negatively impact it at all. Positive? Well, depends on the competition I suppose, having a HTTPS shows care for your community and providing a secure service is a good thing, but I wouldn't expect much of a nudge based on this alone.
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
-
Can a Swiss mailing address hurt my ranking in the USA
Hello, I have a US phone number on my website because all my clients are in the USA but a Swiss address on my website because I am based in Switzerland. I also registered my website on google my business with a Swiss address. I noticed that I rank fairly well (on the 1 st page for many keywords in Switzerland when searching from my location (Switzerland) on google.com but when I connect to adwords (choosing USA) or with a proxy in the USA to check my ranking I see myself nowhere on the 1 st page.Why is that ? is it because I have a Swiss address ?Is the fact that I have a Swiss address and I am based in Switzerland hurt my ranking in the USA ?Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
The review stars for my ecommerce site in the organic search disappeared, how can I have them shown again?
We run www.prams.net, an ecommerce store for strollers and other baby products out of the Uk. We always followed schema and the stars appeared in our product snippets in the organic search, helping us a lot. A couple of weeks ago the stars stopped appearing. When I do the site:www.prams.net they appear but not in the search results anymore. We have a french site as well. www.poussette.com, their it still works. Has anybody got tips what we can do to make the stars appear again? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Converting to HTTPS
I have a 10 yr old website that we are just now adding a Symantec SSL with Extended Validation. I've seen some older posts about whether switching to URL's to HTTP effects Google ranking and I understand it may in the short run, but I wondered if anyone had any updated info about how best to go about this. Are there any step by step articles that could walk me through this? Our certificate is already installed now, but we haven't forced it out there yet. If I understand right, we will use the HTTPS on the entire site. I am not very experienced with 301's, but I believe I can set this up in Godaddy.com where our domain is reigstered so that our old HTTP forwards to HTTPS. Also, I don't think this effects anything within GWT so I don't think I have to make any changes there. Am I missing anything? FYI, the prices for this on the Symantec site are pretty high for a small business like ours. I looked around and found https://www.thesslstore.com/, an SSL reseller, had cheaper prices listed on their site. As it turns out, I called to ask a technical question and the sales person offered to email me a custom quote that was even cheaper than what was listed on their site. So if you are dealing with a limited budget, I might recommend you call The SSL Store and get a quote from them. I am not an affiliate and having nothing to do with them, I was just happy with their service and I believe it cost me about 1/2 of the price on the Symantec site. Hope that helps someone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacksghost0 -
Why does this site rank above us?
We own www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and over the last 8 months have built some decent guest post, charity and customer links but still we seem to be beaten on good words such as banners, banner, vinyl banner, pvc banner etc by this website www-signfirm.com we just cannot figure out how this is happening and would be very grateful if someone with great wisdom could give us an in-site into why this is happening and we would be very grateful..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
How can I improve my rankings in Google with help of seomoz
Hey guys, I have joined seomoz today and set up campaigns for my sites. I got reports about keyword rankings, errors, notices etc. But I am still confused about how to use seomoz in order to improve my rankings. My point is does seomoz provides any services for improving position in google or simply seomoz provides only reporting? These reports are good but my ultimate goal to join seomoz is to improve my rankings for my each website and each post. Please help. BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
First eCommerce site, any tips on how to increase rankings would be appreciated.
As I mentioned I'm working on a new eCommerce site and just want some hints and tip on how I can potentially get the most out of ranking it. http://fuchia.co.uk/ I've meta titled / tag most of the products with relevant keywords, we have a good social standing so far with growth on Twitter + facebook but conversions are currently low or only coming through the website's eBay store (that has no connection on the site)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOAndy0 -
Negative impact on crawling after upload robots.txt file on HTTPS pages
I experienced negative impact on crawling after upload robots.txt file on HTTPS pages. You can find out both URLs as follow. Robots.txt File for HTTP: http://www.vistastores.com/robots.txt Robots.txt File for HTTPS: https://www.vistastores.com/robots.txt I have disallowed all crawlers for HTTPS pages with following syntax. User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
Disallow: / Does it matter for that? If I have done any thing wrong so give me more idea to fix this issue.0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0