Moving to https
-
Hi all and thanks for taking the time to read my question.
We are going to migrate a very small website from http to https, its a roughly 9 page site with 5 of those being product pages.
I figured I would have to set a canonical and permanent 301 redirects for each page.
But our tech guys suggested just doing a binding to https so any traffic hitting our site with a http url would automatically get redirected to the https version.
So if someone land on http://mydomain, it would automatically return https://mydomain
Does this sound correct or would we need to do additional tasks even if we go down the binding route?thanks again for looking.
-
Here's the step-by-step right and easy way:
-
1. Sign-up for Google Webmaster Tools and create individual sites for 4 variants of your website:
-
http non-www
-
http www
-
https non-www
-
https www
-
2. Set the preferred domain among the above four.
-
3. Add an canonical URL for all pages for either https://www. or https://.., whichever you choose.
-
4. Add 301 redirect from http:// to https:// via htaccess using mod_rewrite.
-
5. Use Google Webmaster Tools "Fetch as Google", under "Crawl" in your http:// sites to confirm that http://.. gets redirected and optionally submit those redirects to be indexed by Google (just to make sure).
-
6. Build and submit a sitemap for your preferred domain site (one of the https://..) via Google Webmaster Tools.
-
7. Optionally, connect your Google Analytics property with your preferred domain site in Google Webmaster Tools.
-
-
This sounds odd to me - in my experience, if you want to load one page by a server sends you another, that's a redirect. It doesn't matter how the technology works on the server side as long as the initial URL returns a 301 before the server returns a different page.
It's possible that you and your tech guys aren't really talking about different things, you're just coming at it from different angles. Could you ask them to implement the solution they're suggesting, then use http://httpstatus.io/ to test an http:// URL to see what server code it returns? That might be a good way to communicate what you're looking for. The important thing here is to stress that your tech guys can code the server however they want, as long as it has the right output (301 redirects).
And, of course, use canonicals.
-
I would suggest migrating the whole site, and 301 redirecting all the http pages to the https versions. Without a proper redirect you risk the possibility of losing any link juice that would be directed at that page. A canonical should technically cover that, but the hard 301 leaves no room for robot interpretation.
Also, why leave the http version when you have a secure version available?
-
We have been considering switching to https as well, what are the pros and cons of doing this that you have heard on your end?
Make sure you have proper redirects as well.
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
-
Help to decide of domain move reversal after 5 months!
Hello, first sorry for my bad english,it isn't my first lanugage.
Technical SEO | | Milad25
I have a website with 13 years of history and activity. 5 Months ago we received an warning message from our domain provider which would seize our domain because of sanctions (i live in Iran), and they have seized many of iranian domains since then, therefore i have decided to quickly change my domain to another address so i could save my website as much as possible before they take out my domain...
I have moved my website successfully to a new domain address and have done everything necessary for a good domain move (301 all links, change template and...) I have also used the "Change of Address Tool" provided in google search console so google knows my new domain address and change all of my links...
Unfortunately 90% of my traffics comes from google, therefore we are hevaily depending on organic traffic.
Since i have changed my domain address my traffic has been declining, and now i have only 30% of the traffic input left from google compared to my old domain 5 months ago. (i had recently some SEO troubles too which could effect this decline even more)
Fortunately my old domain wasn't seized by the domain provider and i have successfully transfered it to another provide recently so there is no danger for my old domain anymore.
My question is, should i move my website back to my old domain (cancel the google "Change of Address Tool" and use it again to move the new domain back to the old domain)? My old domain has more than 13 Years of history,has many backlinks within this 13years, and till now, i cannot get good rankings with new posts on the new domain, sometimes google even does not index my new articles several days, but my old domain ranks still well (i have tested a new article on the old domain to see how it performs and it was not very good, but i think it ranks still better than my new domain).
My top pages and categories has been redirected successful and are still ranking well on google on the new domain address and hasn't been affected negativly, my main problem are new posts that are not ranking well o even does not get indexed for several days!
I don't know what to do now, are 5months not enough for google to completly transfer all domain scores from my old domain to the new one? Will all scores of my old domain even transfer to my old domain eventually? How about the many Backlinks i have pointed to the old domain? (which 90% i cannot change or ask to change to my new address) Will the backlinks scores pointing to the old domain transfer to the new domain?In other hand i fear to move my site back to the old domain because i don't know how google would behave, would all my seo score and rankings come back after i move back to the old domain? Also as far as i know, after 6months of using the google "Change of Address Tool" i cannot cancle the domain change anymore, therefore i have roughly 1 month to decide to cancle the move or not...
Please if anyone could help or guide me what to do it would be life saving for me, because my whole income and my family depends on my website... 😞0 -
My ranking drop after migrating to https
Hey, I have migrated my website from http to https. But, all my ranking is dropped from first page to 3 or 4 page or some keywords are disappeared. I have redirected all my urls to https and done everything properly. Please help me. My website is justinterio.com
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore1 -
HTTPS for form pages?
I am creating a small business website for a friend in Recruitment. It’s very small and mainly just a shop window for the business. There’s no login area for the website, but there are two areas were users can enter information: General contact us form (giving email and phone number) Applying for a job (attaching a resume) The forms are using Ninja Forms – which I believe are secure in passing information. But am I missing anything? Do I need to make these pages https at all? I’m quite new to building sites from scratch. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | joberts0 -
Pagespeed drop on https
Hi all, Since I have moved from http to https my pagespeed has dropped. My hosting company/ programmer say this is normal but I am not happy with the results. Before: mobile 69 desktop 89 Now: Mobile: 52 desktop 69 Anybody experience with this issue? All help is welcome! Thank You in advance Tymen
Technical SEO | | Tymen0 -
Switching from HTTP to HTTPS and google webmaster
HI, I've recently moved one of my sites www.thegoldregister.co.uk to https. I'm using wordpress and put in the permanent 301 redirect for all pages to false https for all pages in the htaaccess file. I've updated the settings in google analytics to https for the original site. All seems to be working well. Regarding the google webmaster tools and what needs to be done. I'm very confused by the google documentation on this subject around https. Does all my crawl data and indexing from http site still stand and be inherited by the https version because of the redirects in place. I'm really worried I will lose all of this indexing data, I looked at the "change of address" in the settings of webmaster, but this seems to refer to changing the actual domain name rather than the protocol which i haven't at all. I've also tried adding the https version to the console as well, but the https version is showing a severe warning "is robots.txt blocking some important pages". I don't understand this error as it's the same version and file as the http site being generated by all in one seo pack for wordpress (see below at bottom). The warning is against line 5 saying it will ignore it. What i don't understand is i don't get this error in the webmaster console with the http version which is the same file?? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Kind regards Steve User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | lqz
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Crawl-delay: 10 ceLAHIv.jpg0 -
Should we move our documentation off subdomain?
Background: We have a popular open source e-commerce platform at http://spreecommerce.com. Right now the documentation is on http://guides.spreecommerce.com. We have "edge" documentation (for stuff that's not yet released) on http://edgeguides.spreecommerce.com but since it's largely duplicative we've told google not to index any of the edge stuff (via robots.txt). Question: Should we consider moving the guides under the main website under /docs or something like this? There's a ton of great content that people often read to learn more about the platform. Seems like we might be diluting our juice a bit to have it on a separate domain. WDYT?
Technical SEO | | schof0 -
SEO Disasters - Links to Stories of Site Moves/Rebuilds Gone Bad?
Hello, everyone.. I am looking for some links to stories, articles, what have you describing medium to large complex sites that have moved, changed CMS, changed domains, etc, and ended up in a total SEO disaster. Really appreciate anything the community here has or can find! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DuPont0 -
Would you move the site to a different host or change packages at a significant expense in order to eliminate the meta refresh
When I began working with a site (http://www.visix.com) , I discovered a number of hosting constraints that hampered some SEO related changes I wanted to make. A year later, the site was teetering on the 1st page for a particular keyword of choice and when the Panda & Penguin updates happened, the site got passed by 3M & Amazon, both much bigger sites. (was #11, now #13) Now I'm thinking I should try and use the homepage to rank for keyword "digital signage software", where originally I was making progress with an inner page. Now I am revisting the homepage meta refresh and need to decide if it is enough of an issue to warrant a hosting change. http://www.visix.com has a meta-refresh "0" seconds to http://www.visix.com/index.aspx I know sites can rank well with these, although I don't know the level of handicap that it has. In an article here, http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection there is a statement saying that a meta-refresh will not pass as much link juice as a 301 redirect. I have read about every opinion I can find, and would appreciate other's opinions on the matter. The host is Network Solutions and the hosting package does not allow 301 redirects, among other things. Would you move the site to a different host or change packages at a significant expense in order to eliminate the meta refresh or is it not a big deal on a well established site? Thanks very much for your feedback!
Technical SEO | | IntegralOCR30