Is Link Weight Lost Moving from HTTP to HTTPS?
-
I'm considering moving a site from http://www.domain.com/ to https://domain.com/. I would put a 301 redirect in place to make sure all of the links and traffic transfer over but am worried about losing rankings since we have many years worth of links going to the old urls. My understanding is that a 301 will transfer 90%+ of the link weight to the new url, but not 100%. Is there an exception to this rule when doing a 301 redirect within the same domain (but to a different protocol and subdomain)? Should we expect to lose 1-10% of our link weight if we chose to make this switch?
-
According to Google's saying on 301 redirect link dilution, you should lose some of the weight carried by those links.
However, as Google just revealed that HTTPS sites get a slight, minimal in fact, chance to do better in search results, HUNDREDS of sites are moving to SSL. Of all the pages that I've been tracking and reading, there was no change at all in rankings by switching to HTTPS, anyway is too soon to assume conclusions, the statement was released last week, so all those sites I am reading about are just "too new" in HTTPS to take conclusions.
My guts tell me that these 301 should act the same way as any other 301 does (diluting some of the link weight), or it could be yet another way to cheat Google, but will see what happens.
I myself moved my site over the weekend to HTTPS with 301, haven't see any change, but I guess what I can loose in the 301 redirects can be gained by using SSL?
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
-
301 Old domain with HTTPS to new domain with HTTPS
I am a bit boggled about https to https we redirected olddomain.com to https://www.newdomain.com, but redirecting https://www.olddomain.com or non-www is not possible. because the certificate does not exist on a level where you are redirecting. only if I setup a new host and add a htaccess file will this work. What should I do? just redirect the rest and hope for the best?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waqid0 -
Need references to a company that can transition our 1000 page website from Http to Https without breaking our SEO backlinks and site structure
Hi Ya'll I'm looking for a company or independent who can transition our website from http to https. I want to make sure they know what they're doing with a Wordpress website. More importantly, i want to make sure they don't break any seo juice from external sources while internally nothing gets broken. Anyone have any good recommendations? You can reply back or DM me. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
More bad links
Hi, After a recent disastrous dalliance with a rogue SEO company I disavowed quite a few domains (links he had gained) which I was receiving a penalty of about 23 places. I cleaned up the site and added meta descriptions where missing, and deleted duplicate titles and pages. This gained me another 5 places. In the meantime I have been getting a few links from wedding blogs, adobe forums and other relevant sites so was expecting an upward momentum. Since the high point of bottom of page 1 I have slowly slid back down to near the bottom of page two for my main keywords. Just checked my webmaster tools latest links and another 4 domains have appeared (gained by the dodgy SEO) : domain:erwinskee.blog.co.uk domain:grencholerz.blog.co.uk domain:valeriiees.blog.co.uk domain:gb.bizin.eu They all look bad so I am going to disavow. I expect to find an improvement when I disavow these new domains. As I have said, have started using the open site explorer tool to check my competitors backlinks and getting some low level links(I'm a wedding photographer) like forum comments and blog comments and good directories. I know there is much more than this to SEO and plan on raising my game as time progresses. I have also gained more links from the domains I disavowed on the 8th January mostly from www.friendfeed.com. will webmaster tools ignore any new links from previously disavowed domains? Like I have said I know there are better ways to get links, but are these links (forum comments, blog comments and respectable directories) one way of raising my rankings? To be honest that is all my competitors have got other than some of the top boys might have a photograph or two on another site with a link. No-one has a decent article or review anywhere (which is my next stage of getting links). Thanks! David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Do links to a domain that re-directs to my domain pass link equity?
Hi guys. We've recently taken control of a third-party site and we're going to set up a domain re-direct so any traffic comes to our site. With any existing links that the third-party site has, will these pass link equity to our main site through the redirect? Thanks, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Branded Links : But not got any ranking..
Hi there. I'm SEO expert myself. I am building quality and authority backlinks with branded anchor text. My website has now over 1.5k backlinks with branded anchor text and generic keywords. But my website still not showing in SERPS with my targeted niche or anchor text. Do i need to build backlinks with exact match anchor text if yes then how much? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalitsoft0 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Reciprocal link finder tool - not looking to do reciprocal links.
The company I work for had an old SEO company that did a lot of reciprocal links with websites that are not what we want to be associated with. Does anyone know of a tool that might be able to tell us if there are still reciprical links to our site? I want to try and find them, but the old pages we had with links going out have been deleted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b2bcfo0 -
Links from tumblr
I have two links from hosted tumblr blogs which are not on tumblr.com. So, website1 has a tumblr blog: tumblr.website1.com And another site website2.com also uses the a record/custom domains option from tumblr but not on a subdomain, which is decribed below: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains Does this mean that all links from such sites count as coming from the same IP in google's eyes? Or is there value in getting links from multiple sites because the a-record doesn't affect SEO in a negative way? Many thanks, Mike.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team740