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 -
Https Cached Site
Hi there, I recently switch my site to a new ecommerce platform which hosts the SSL certificate on their end so my site no longer has the HTTPS status unless a user is going through the checkout. Google has cached the HTTPS version of the site so in search it comes up sometimes which leads to a nasty warning that the site may not be what they are looking for. Is there a way to tell google NOT to look at the https version of the site anymore? Thanks! Bianca
Technical SEO | | TheBatesMillStore0 -
301 Multiple Sites to Main Site
Over the past couple years I had 3 sites that sold basically the same products and content. I later realized this had no value to my customers or Google so I 301 redirected Site 2 and Site 3 to my main site (Site 1). Of course this pushed a lot of page rank over to Site 1 and the site has been ranking great. About a week ago I moved my main site to a new eCommerce platform which required me to 301 redirect all the url's to the new platform url's which I did for all the main site links (Site 1). During this time I decided it was probably better off if I DID NOT 301 redirect all the links from the other 2 sites as well. I just didn't see the need as I figured Google realized at this point those sites were gone and I started fearing Google would get me for Page Rank munipulation for 301 redirecting 2 whole sites to my main site. Now I am getting over 1,000 404 crawl errors in GWT as Google can no longer find the URL's for Site 2 and Site 3. Plus my rankings have dropped substantially over the past week, part of which I know is from switching platforms. Question, did I make a mistake not 301 redirecting the url's from the old sites (Site 2 and Site 3) to my new ecommerce url's at Site 1?
Technical SEO | | SLINC0 -
Multilingual blogs and site structure
Hi everyone, I have a question about multilingual blogs and site structure. Right now, we have the typical subfolder localization structure. ex: domain.com/page (english site) domain.com/ja/page (japanese site) However, the blog is a slightly more complicated. We'd like to have english posts available in other languages (as many of our users are bilinguals). The current structure suggests we use a typical domain.com/blog or domain.com/ja/blog format, but we have issues if a Japanese (logged in) user wants to view an English page. domain.com/blog/article would redirect them to domain.com/ja/blog/article thus 404-ing the user if the post doesn't exist in the alternate language. One suggestion (that I have seen on sites such as etsy/spotify is to add a /en/ to the blog area: ex domain.com/en/blog domain.com/ja/blog Would this be the correct way to avoid this issue? I know we could technically work around the 404 issue, but I don't want to create duplicate posts in /ja/ that are in English or visa versa. Would it affect the rest of the site if we use a /en/ subfolder just for the blog? Another option is to use: domain.com/blog/en domain.com/blog/ja but I'm not sure if this alternative is better. Any help would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Seiyav0 -
Cross links between sites
hi, We have several ecommerce sites and we cross linked 3 of them by mistake. We realize that the sites were linked through WMT, We have shut down 2 of the sites about 2 months ago, but WMT still shows the links coming from those 2 sites. how do we make sure that google will see the sites are shut down. Is there a better of way resolving this issue. We are no longer using those sites, so do not need them to be active. whats the best solution to show google that the links are no longer there. Crawler shows that it was able to crawl the site 45 days after it is shut down. thanks nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Varicose Veins Just Not Ranking
Buonjourno from 6 degrees C damn cold wetherby UK 🙂 This page http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/ has remained stubbornly out of the Google rankings for target term "Varicose Veins" Heres what Ive done so far:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
1. Made sure the HTML is optimised for the target term
2. Linked from the home page via a scrolling footer Now i'm not looking for a page 1 result but I'm curious to know why the term hasnt even touched the unexplored backwaters of even page 3. p.s If there is a canonical problem please tell me how you diagnosed that 🙂 Thanks in advance, David NB - Just spotted this page can be access via 2 different URLS (Uppercase W being the difference) http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/
http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/What-are-they/0 -
What do the mozzers think about this site of mine?
Hello SEO MOzzers, I am today wanting your feedback on a site that I recently went live with. My Google rankings for the main keywords are doing very well considering the site has been live for 3 weeks now. I of course have a list of items that i'm still working on, completing meta description tags, title tags, adding copy content to category pages, updating h1 tags, working on our backlinking campaign, etc. The site is www.profitness-supplies.com Let me know what you think Mozzers
Technical SEO | | seohive-2227200 -
Checkout on different domain
Is it a bad SEO move to have a your checkout process on a separate domain instead of the main domain for a ecommerce site. There is no real content on the checkout pages and they are completely new pages that are not indexed in the search engines. Do to the backend architecture it is impossibe for us to have them on the same domain. An example is this page: http://www.printingforless.com/2/Brochure-Printing.html One option we've discussed to not pass page rank on to the checkout domain by iFraming all of the links to the checkout domain. We could also move the checkout process to a subdomain instead of a new domain. Please ignore the concerns with visitors security and conversion rate. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PrintingForLess.com0