Should I add SSL certificate site-wide? Or just on Checkout?
-
I'm setting up my SSL certificate and my programmer said it's smart to just apply it to the entire site. I'm concerned about how this could affect my SEO work. I've heard as far as SEO is concerned, applying it to just the checkout pages is the best way to do it.
What are your thoughts? What are potential problems?
-
Thanks for the input.
Irving, I was going to put a redirect in, so that any time a user goes to the checkout page, it redirects from the http:// version to the https:// version (no matter how they get there: clicking a link, typing it in directly, black magic, etc). I believe the search engine bot should honor the redirect and only see the https version.
-
just on the checkout for the reason that the happy dude in the teal shirt said above me
make sure when the user jumps to and from https and http that you are using absolute links or you could wind up with duplicate versions of the site indexed in both http and https
-
I'd do it just on the checkout pages. If you use https over your entire site, every page will have to load all of its own resources as the browser won't be able to cache any files. I'd prefer to keep your page load times down, and only use https on pages that need it.
-
I think what your programmer meant to say is "It's easier to apply SSL to the entire site". For most instances on a new or existing site, I would recommend just adding it to the checkout page.
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
-
I have a question about the impact of a root domain redirect on site-wide redirects and slugs.
I have a question about the impact (if any) of site-wide redirects for DNS/hosting change purposes. I am preparing to redirect the domain for a site I manage from https://siteImanage.com to https://www.siteImanage.com. Traffic to the site currently redirects in reverse, from https://www.siteImanage.com to https://siteImanage.com. Based on my research, I understand that making this change should not affect the site’s excellent SEO as long as my canonical tags are updated and a 301 redirect is in place. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a potential consequence of this switch I’m not considering. Because this redirect lives at the root of all the site’s slugs and existing redirects, will it technically produce a redirect chain or a redirect loop? If it does, is that problematic? Thanks for your input!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms0 -
How Often is Site Crawled
Good morning- I saw some errors in my first crawl and immediately removed the pages from my website. I then re-created my XML sitemap and uploaded to Google. The question I have is will the site be crawled to recognize the changes in the next day or so? The pages were just placed on the site as test pages and never removed. The initial crawl that notified me it was done found the errors and were removed. Thanks for your help. Peter
Technical SEO | | VT_Pete0 -
Just noindexed and redirected junk from my site. Now what?
Hi to all! I've just finished 301 redirecting some pages and "noindex - follow" some other. I have to add a lot of canonicals yet, but this is a start. Now how I check the results? Should I wait a week or so to see if something improves? How long does it takes for Google to remove the pages I've just redirected and noindexed? My site is crawled every day (as all sites I guess). Thanks!
Technical SEO | | enriquef0 -
Site maintenance and crawling
Hey all, Rarely, but sometimes we require to take down our site for server maintenance, upgrades or various other system/network reasons. More often than not these downtimes are avoidable and we can redirect or eliminate the client side downtime. We have a 'down for maintenance - be back soon' page that is client facing. ANd outages are often no more than an hour tops. My question is, if the site is crawled by Bing/Google at the time of site being down, what is the best way of ensuring the indexed links are not refreshed with this maintenance content? (ie: this is what the pages look like now, so this is what the SE will index). I was thinking that add a no crawl to the robots.txt for the period of downtime and remove it once back up, but will this potentially affect results as well?
Technical SEO | | Daylan1 -
Time on site
From what I understand, if you search for a keyword say "blue widgets" and you click on a result, and then spend 10 seconds there, and go back to google and click on a different result google will track that first result as being not very relevant. What I don't understand is what happens when (and this happens all the time, i did it today) you click on a result go to that page, find it (not?) relevant and then get distracted, phone call, or someone calls you into another room in the office. You end up accidentally leaving the tab open all day long, and never go back to the google search. So your time on site to google is what? infinity? there must be an upper cap here? at some point they must say, ok, the user is gone, time on site = our maximum = 5 minutes?!? Get me? any insight?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0 -
Is it a good idea to make 301 from a site which you know google has banned certain keywords for to a new site with similar content
Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?
Technical SEO | | Kofoed0 -
Adding no follow links on my site
I am getting a warning about having too many links on my page www.accessoriesonline.co.uk (152) but I don't want to remove any links from the site. Its an ecommerce site with categories across the top, featured products and then a further category navigation in the footer. Would it be beneficial if I added a rel="nofollow" to the links in the footer as these are duplicates of the one's in the header or would this harm the links in the header and the destination URL's which I definitely want to be crawled? Also, does anyone know if SEOMOZ considers links with a rel=nofollow as an actually link when they calculate their overview? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | gavinhoman0 -
How do I create an RSS feed for my site?
I do NOT have a cms website. just php/html. How do I create a feed so I can register it with feedburner? Not for my blog just the website its self.
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110