I agree with Jane. Unless there are reasons why the whole site needs to be secure, it makes more sense for just the areas where sensitive information is being submitted to be SSL encrypted.

http: requests are processed more quickly than https: ones due to the SSL handshake required to produce the cryptographic parameters for the user's session - so your site would be a little quicker if you weren't using SSL.

However, if you do decide to use http: rather than https: for the product & category pages like Jane has suggested - you'd need to ensure that the https: versions of these pages redirect to http:... again to avoid duplicate content.

Hi Jason,

It's fine to 301 redirect from http: to https: and it's quite common for sites that use SSL. It's exactly the same principle as redirecting from a non-www to www (e.g. http://example.com to http://www.example.com) - which is considered to be good practice. But there should only be a single redirect. So you should ensure that http://example.com redirects to https://www.example.com without first redirecting to http://www.example.com.

I would also make sure that all pages (not just the homepage) redirect from http: to https: too to ensure there are no duplicate content issues on the rest of the site.

Hi Jenny

jStrong is correct. Subscript (_{) and superscript (^{) tags are not going to have any effect (positive or negative) on SEO.}}

I don't think you need to be overly concerned about this if you're already using rel="canonical".

We regularly receive inbound links with these parameters included in them.

The reason why this happens is that we included these parameters to track some of our email and social campaigns and sometimes people find these links and link to them. These are perfectly natural, just that the people that link to them might not know about these parameters and may think they are part of the URL and the links may not work without them.

Hi  Vakantiehuizen,

If you're referring to an inbound link or page being indexed containing query string parameters e.g. example.com?utm_source=x, then yes...these may cause issues with duplicate content and SEO. If you have pages with these parameters on your site then you should use the rel="canonical" tag to specify the canonical URL that you'd like Google to rank. Also, you should never include these parameters for internal links on your site.

Although I don't know what you mean when you say "UTM tag link is not a natural link". Could you explain?

Thanks for your comments Gianluca.

I think Google's guidelines are somewhat ambiguous. Here it does state that "if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

I think you've explained it nicely though.

Hi Jorge

The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag is not suitable for pages that are in the same language as these are essentially duplicates rather than alternative language versions.

I'd use the  rel="canonical" tag to point to the main page until the translations of those pages are available.

Webmaster Tools should allow you to see any issues.