Http vs https: which is better for seo / usability
-
Hi All,
Firstly thank you for taking the time to look. My dilemma is as follows;
I have a site on wordpress that I have added an ssl certificate to and the entire domain is secure.
The site has a mix of content including a blog area and product pages.
My question is what does Google prefer, http or https or does it not matter
As i see it my option is to keep the entire site as https and enforce this sitewide so all non secure content redirects to the https version or i could enforce https just in the cart and or product pages, all other content, homepage, blog, about us, contact us etc would be http.
From an seo perspective ie google search engine, is their a best way to proceed?
Finally, as i currently have http and https both displaying ie duplicate, what would be the way to fix this, i have yoast plugin so can set the canonical there and can also edit my robot.txt.
I have come across this resource (http://www.creare.co.uk/http-vs-https-duplicate-content) and am wondering if this guideline is still correct or is there another more current way, if so I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction.
thanks in advance.
-
Hi tahirekhanvc,
I'm a big fan of Matt Cutts, and you should be, too. Check out what he has to say about duplicate content: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319706/Googles-Matt-Cutts-A-Little-Duplicate-Content-Wont-Hurt-Your-Rankings
I had a similar issue with a client a year or so ago. As I'm sure you know, secure pages are encrypted and need to be decrypted, which takes more time and requires more resources. And with that, speed may become an issue, and speed is a ranking factor.
A good rule of thumb is to secure pages that communicate private data, i.e. contact pages, carts, etc. If you are offering some sort of security service, or if your business model requires earning a great deal of trust from your visitors, then go secure the site. Now I'm talking about sites like https://squareup.com/ (FYI, I actually do not recommend that service but you can see the home page is secure). And that company actually takes it one step further with an EV SSL, where you can show your company name in the green bar. Go for a purpose, but not SEO in particular.
Matt went over this about the time Facebook switched to https. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801641 Now it's up to you to make the call, but make it and stick with it. What you don't want to do is go back and forth a couple times trying to rank better thinking that this is a major problem.
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
-
SEO Title Length
Hi Everyone. I have a few pages being flagged with "Title Too Long". However, these are page 2, page 3, page 4, etc of category pages. They obviously have "| Page x of x" at the end of the title. Can these be ignored or is there a more SEO friendly way of handling this issue? Thanks. Michael
Technical SEO | | nomad_blogger0 -
Link to AMP VS AMP Google Cache VS Standard page?
Hi guys, During the link building strategy, which version should i prefer as a destination between: to the normal version (php page) to the Amp page of the Website to the Amp page of Google Cache The main doubt is between AMP of the website or standard Version. Does the canonical meta equals the situation or there is a better solution? Thank you so mutch!
Technical SEO | | Dante_Alighieri0 -
JSON-LD meta data: Do you have any rules/recommendations for using BlogPosting vs Article?
Dear Moz Community. I'm looking at moving from in-line Microdata in the HTML to JSON-LD on the web pages that I manage. Seems a far simpler solution having all the meta data in one place - especially for trouble shooting! With this in mind I've started to change the page templates on my personal site before I tackle the ones for my eCommerce site. I've made a start, and I'm still working on the templates producing some default values (like if a page doesn't have an associated image) but have been wondering if any of you have any rules/recommendations for using BlogPosting vs Article? I'd call this type of page an Article:
Technical SEO | | andystorey
https://cycling-jersey-collection.com/browse-collection/selle-italia-chinol-seb-bennotto-1982-team-jersey Whereas this page is from the /blog so that should probably be a BlogPosting:
https://cycling-jersey-collection.com/blog/2017-worldtour-team-jerseys I've used the following resources but it would be great to get a discussion on here.
https://yoast.com/structured-data-schema-ultimate-guide/
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/data-type-selector
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/ I'm keen to get this 100% right as once this is done I'm going to drive through some further changes to get some progress on things like this: https://moz.com/blog/ranking-zero-seo-for-answers
https://moz.com/blog/what-we-learned-analyzing-featured-snippets Kind Regards andy moz-screenshot.jpg1 -
Will it make any difference to SEO on an ecommerce site if they use their SSL certificate (https) across every page
I know that e-commerce sites usually have SSL certificates on their payment pages. A site I have come across is using has the https: prefix to every page on their site. I'm just wondering if this will make any difference to the site in the eyes of Search Engines, and whether it could effect the rankings of the site?
Technical SEO | | Sayers1 -
SEO plugin by Yoast messing up my title/meta description
Hey guys, I'm having some issues with my wordpress blog, and I believe SEO plugin by Yoast could be the one causing it. I have set a title for my wordpress blog, and a tagline. This was set in dashboard > settings > general Under "titles and metas" > home in the plugin it says, title: %%sitename%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitedesc%%, and meta description is blank. The reports on seomoz says my title is title+meta description - making it to long (to many characters). What could be the issue here? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | danielpett0 -
Expressionengine SEO
One of my clients is using expressionengine CMS, and even the simplest things like creating unique page titles seem to be a nightmare. When I try to change page title via cms it also changes navigation menu. Any help will be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Thommas0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Ecommerce SEO with 130 keywords
Hello everyone, My name is Davys and I'm what you call a newbie...so the question may sound stupid....But where we go. In this campaign I will be targeting around 130 to 150 keywords to my store. So here is the technical question. What is the right way of indexing 150 keywords? Should I attempt to have all 150 going to www.mysite.com or should I break it down into smaller pages if I can put it that way. Like www.mysite.com/pages/bikiniwax for example. Even if I break it down, what is the right amount of keywords that I should SEO per page? Or do 150 pages? Please helppppppppppppppppppppp.... 🙂 Thanks a lot for your help.
Technical SEO | | Davys0