Do I lose link juice if I have a https site and someone links to me using http instead?
-
We have recently launched a https site which is getting some organic links some of which are using https and some are using http. Am I losing link juice on the ones linked using http even though I am redirecting or does Google view them the same way? As most people still use http naturally will it look strange to google if I contact anyone who has given us a link and ask them to change to https?
-
Thanks, that was my impression of it as well. Just wanted to check I wasn't overlooking something.
-
Hi Jonathan
Not really. Some say it shortens load times because it shortens code on the page, but that's minimal. I am looking at it from the standpoint of if you ever change your domain or URL structure, you don't have to go through the tedious task of manually changing internal links.
Does that make sense?
-
Is there any reason to use relative Urls from an SEO perspective?
-
Hi Hector
This is something I wouldn't be too concerned about. Do the following and you will be fine:
-
Ensure all pages are following the new https structure
-
No http version
-
Make sure your site is either www. or non www. consistently
-
Make sure you have no chain redirects
-
Update any old redirect files
-
Make sure resources are secure as well (CSS files / javascript / widgets / images / etc)
-
Make sure canonical tags reflect URL change
-
Update your sitemap.xml
-
Update sitemap.xml in Google Webmaster Tools / Bing Webmaster Tools
-
Correct all of your internal links to reflect the new structure
-
Consider using relative URLs
-
If you want, find your high quality backlinks using Moz or Majestic
-
Reach out and ask them to reflect the https structure
Again, this isn't a huge issue as Google will pass 90-99% of link equity and https is now a ranking factor. You should be all good, but make sure you run through this list I just put up for you and you can tie up any loose ends. Here's a great resource from Moz.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
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
-
Subdomain and Domain Linking Strategy
Here is my question for SEO. We are a mug printing company and we have a website specifically for bulk orders hosted at our main link (example.com). For the purposes of this example we will assume that we only print mugs for bands. Eg. orders for 100 mugs at a time for a band. We have had a need to create stores for bands so that they can then pass a link to their fans to purchase mugs. Our main website deals specifically with bulk orders only with customer provided logos, so extending this workflow to our main domain takes quite a bit of development time. Because of this, we purchased a service that allows us to create stores under the new domain stores.example.com. The root domain is the same as our main domain but there is “stores” in front of the domain. A band’s website that we would create would then look something like : stores.example.com/band1_merchandise These links are going to be spread by the band all over the web, and it is in my hope to be able to take advantage of this. Ideally stores.example.com/band1_merchandise being spread around will also give us a boost to www.example.com My question is how can we benefit the most from bands sharing the subdomain link such that our main website will be able to see an SEO benefit.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | masonwong0 -
Free tool, and it ranks well for adult sites and checking if they are down, will that hurt us with ranking for normal sites with google?
Hi all, We rank for searches around "is youporn down" and similar because we provide a free tool to check if a website is up or down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youporn I am worried that ranking for these adult searches is hurting us with ranking for things like "is reddit down", thoughts? I'd appreciate some input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bwb0 -
Should I Disavow More Links
My SEO website got hit with a very severe penalty about a year ago and it was totally banished from the rankings for all of the money terms like SEO, SEO company and search engine optimisation (before the penalty I ranked in the top 10-15 for all of those phrases, top 3 for SEO company). I was probably hit for being listed in shed loads of paid directories, low quality free directories, footer links in client sites, keyword forum signature links and articles with keyword rich text links. A month or so after I got hit I started trying to clean up my link profile, I got rid of all of the client website links, I changed the link text on the majority of forum signature links and article links, I managed to get rid of about 50 directory links and the ones that I could not get taken down I disavowed - about 150. During that time I sent 2-3 separate reconsideration requests and I got this message each time: "Links to your site violate Google's quality guidelines" After doing all of that work and being rejected I pretty much gave up - things just seemed to get worst, not only was I no longer ranking for the money terms, but all of my blog posts tanked as well. I got my site redesigned and switched to Wordpress - I used 301 redirects and everything but they totally didn't work. My organic traffic went down to less than 50 hits a day - before the penalty I was getting over 300 a day. Then on Saturday just gone, almost exactly a year after I got hit with the penalty I noticed my site ranking in position 23 on Google.co.uk in the UK for the competitive phrase SEO company from being absolutely nowhere and I do mean nowhere. This sign has given me hope and the motivation to get rid of the penalty altogether, update all of my articles, get rid of bad advice in old blog posts and get rid of the rest of the bad links. Thing is that I am nervous to go getting rid of more links and disavowing, what if I do more harm then good? Do you think the penalty has been removed and I should just leave the rest of the bad links or should I continue trying to clean things up? By the way, my website is http://www.seoco.co.uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eavesy1 -
Are link directories still effective? is there a risk?
We've contracted a traditional SEO firm, mostly for link building. As part of their plan they want to submit our site to a large list of link directories, and we're not sure if that's a good option. As far as we know, those directories have been ineffective for a long time now, and we're wondering if there is the chance of getting penalized by google. When I asked the agency their opinion about that, they gave me the following answer - Updated and optimized by us - We are partnered with these sites and control quality of these sites. Unique Class C IP address - Links from unique Referring Class C IP plays a very important role in SEO. Powered by high PR backlinks Domain Authority (DA) Score of over 20 These directories are well categorized. So they actually control those directories themselves, which we think is even worse. I'm wondering what does the Moz community think about link directory submission - is there still something to be gained there, is there any risk involved, etc. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | binpress0 -
Links and how they count?
We managed to get ourselves out of a penalty 6 months ago and 100 days later after the message of penalty removable we finally felt that we were moving back on track (not a lot of movement before and 50% down due to links being taken away), we have around 120 really high quality links but 95% of them are urls or the business name. Anyway we still have a couple of pages that I feel are fairly down on rankings and most of the links as mentioned above are high quality but they are either anchor text of the website name or url my main question is that when looking at my competitors I see that they have the same or less links and from much less powerful places (most I would not touch) but they seem to have a ratio of 5 - 10 % of the links are the keywords they are trying to rank for. My question is if you have 50 links from better places but they are unrelated terms such as the web site name or just urls and you have 50 links from average places but 5 - 10% are on related terms to what you are trying to rank for which ones would win out.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
More than one site in same industry
A client wants to have 3 sites in the same industry with a lot of overlapping keywords. Is that white hat? Will Google mind?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to Explain The Danger of Link Networks
A client of mine has been approached by a company that sets up one-off private link networks like this: Main site: http://www.klausparking.com/ Network sites: http://www.carparkingtechnology.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | waynekolenchuk
http://www.carparkingsystem.com/
http://www.victoriaparking.net/
http://www.reginaparking.com/
http://www.torontoparking.net/
http://www.multicarparkingsystem.com/
http://www.carparkingsolutions.com/ The company doing this actually promotes this as a patent-pending feature they call "silos". How do I explain the real danger to my client?1 -
Setting up a Blog for more inbound links
Site A is my Main Site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CLTMichael
Site B is my Blog. Is using site B to link back to site A a good idea or should site A have it's own blog going after keywords?1