Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Redirect to http to https - Pros and Cons
-
Hi,
I know its best practice to redirect a website from http to https, instead of having many entry point to your website. When a website has been running for a long time on http and https, what are the SEO Pros and Cons of implementing a redirect from Http to Https?
-
Do you know how long it takes Google to drop pages from Google's index/cache?
-
(1) no, if you link to an insecure page it counts against you. Since a user or search engine would have to load and visit the insecure content to find the canonical (as that's where it would be), it does not mitigate this. You'll just have to hope it doesn't end up happening too much. Canonical tags only stop content duplication, they have no impact on SEO authority merging or insecure links
(2) If the HTTPS URLs are pretty much exactly the same as their HTTP counterparts and you 301 HTTP to HTTPS, the SEO authority should flow across to HTTPS instead. Canonical tags are not proven to do what 301s do, so you may end up in a mess with those. Most sites experience a slight dip moving from HTTP to HTTPS via proper 301s, however it's not large and doesn't last long if the 301s were done well. Staying on HTTP in the long term, you will lose a lot of rankings (gradually, over time). Since you will be constantly losing, it puts your site's progress 'on hold', so the small dip from moving from HTTP to HTTPS is the 'lesser of two evils' (IMO)
(3) Both. It will reduce the number of times Google crawls HTTP, but only after pages on HTTP are dropped from Google's index / recent cache
-
Thanks for the answer. However, have two more questions: (1) Will implementing canonical tags limit the temporary disruption and (2) If backlinks are pointing to http will these be lost or transferred, i.e. will https pages have less equity or inherit equity of the http pages. Finally, will redirecting to https reduce the number of times Google crawls your site or will google still crawl http until all http pages in the Google cache are removed?
-
Or in NginX format which is usually faster
-
There are no cons that I can think of, a simple script in a sites htaccess file is the best was to implement the redirection.
-
The idea of HTTPS has always been a good one, and most leading businesses implemented it a long time ago.
However, somewhat recently, Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking factor.
Obviously, that got SEOs talking about and debating the subject.
At the time, it was a very small ranking factor, affecting less than 1% of global searches. Even now, it’s not a big factor.
However, security is something that Google takes very seriously, and it’s likely to become more important in the future.
Some SEOs jumped right on it and made the switch.
-
This is a very solid answer. One additional point is that without a forced structure, Google can 'catch out' your secure site linking to your insecure site. Say you have a blog and a post in the blog links to one of your pages, that link is probably created as 'absolute' in your CMS. So suddenly, when you load that blog post on HTTPS, you can see a link pointing to HTTP. Google doesn't like links pointing to insecure content, so over time the situation snowballs and you lose a lot of trust
-
If your current pages can be accessed by http and by https, and if you don't have canonicals or redirects pointing everything to one version or the other, then one very significant "con" for that approach is that you are splitting your link equity. So, if the http page has 50 inbound links, and the https has another 50, you would do better to have one page with 100 inbound links.
Another difference is how browsers show/warn about non-secure pages. As well as any ranking factor they may associate with secure. Again, in favor of redirecting http to https. The visual handling can also impact conversion rates and bounce rates, which can in turn impact ranking.
As far as cons to redirecting, one would be that you might expect a temporary disruption to rankings. There will likely be a bit of a dip, short term. Another is that you will need to remove and then be careful about accidentally adding any non-secure resources (like images) on the https pages, which will then issue a warning to visitors as well as possibly impacting ranks. There is some consensus that redirects (and canonical links) do leak a very small amount of link equity for each hop they take. So, that's another "con". But my recent experiences doing this with two sites have been that after the temporary "dip" of a couple of months, if done properly, the "pros" outweigh the "cons".
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 -
Is there a tool to see all redirects?
I'm thinking this is a silly question, but I've never had to deal with it I thought I'd ask. Ok is there a tool out there that will show all the redirects to a domain. I'm working on a project that I keep stumbling on urls that redirect to the site I'm studying. They don't show up in Open Site or ahrefs as linking domains, but they keep popping up on me. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Https redirect when certificate expired
Hi, How do we 301 an https version of a domain to a page on another website when the security certificate has run out? We have 301 redirected the http version but IT stuck on how to do the expired https. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Clicksjim1 -
Htaccess redirect with question mark
Hi I have a problem setting up my htaccess for a specific page that has a question mark in the link, and one that has a space in the link and also a question mark. So I would like 2 redirects in my htaccess like that: www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=pagename1 to www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=page name2 to www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html I have tried with something like this but doesn't work: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page.php?page=pagename1 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html" [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^page.php?page=page name2 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html" [R=301,L] Could someone tell me what exactly I have to change? Thanks
Technical SEO | | darkanweb0 -
302 or 301 redirect to https ?
I am redirecting whole site to https. Is there a difference between 302 or 301 redirect for seo? Site never been indexed. Planning to do that with .htaccess command RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
Technical SEO | | Kotkov
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] There are plenty of ways http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html Which way would be the best? Thanks is advance0 -
Do search engines treat 307 redirects differently from 302 redirects?
We will need to send our users to an alternate version of our homepage for a few hours for a certain event. The SEO task at hand is to minimize the chance of the special homepage getting crawled and cached in the search engines in place of our normal homepage. (This has happened in the past so the concern is not imaginary.) Among other options, 302 and 307 redirects are being discussed. IE, redirecting www.domain.com to www.domain.com/specialpage. Having used 302s and 301s in the past, I am well aware of how search engines treat them. A 302 effectively says "Hey, Google! Please get rid of the old content on www.domain.com and replace it with the content on /specialpage!" Which is exactly what we don't want. My question is: do the search engines handle 307s any differently? I am hearing that the 307 does NOT result in the content of the second page being cached with the first URL. But I don't see that in the definition below (from w3.org). Then again, why differentiate it from the 302? 307 Temporary Redirect The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI. If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction0 -
Double 301 redirect
Hi together, due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times. Example: www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice? Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0