If a site has https versions of every page, will the search engines view them as duplicate pages?

[harryholmes007]

A client's site has HTTPS versions of every page for their site and it is possible to view both http and https versions of the page.

Do the search engines view this as duplicate content?

[shandaman]

In Short... YES.

But its an easy fix. Just use the google webmaster tools http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=44231 preferred domain. That should fix the issue for you

[harryholmes007]

By the way, I appreciate the best practice, i.e. rel canonical or 301s, which is what we are doing, I am having a debate about what happens if you don't do it, hence my question. I am suggesting dupe page issues.

[shandaman]

My personal opinion is yes you will run into duplicate page issues. But then again one of my clients site has over 500 pages just like that and it ranks fine.. However if fixed who knows what could happen but they don't want to invest the time and money into it.

[irvingw]

yes, it can create duplicate content issues -  you can have non www https and www https pages so just setting a preference in GWMT will not fix this issue

you need to force URLs coming off of secure pages (such as login) to go back to http when the spider follows a non https page on a https page.

[irvingw]

301'ing the https pages is not the solution. once you fix the https page that is leaking https to the rest of the site google will automatically weed out the https pages from their index. doing 301's is just putting a band aid on the problem and not fixing the source of the problem.

[AlanMosley]

You can force https on the server or programicly