Http & https canonicalization issues

[zeepartner]

Howdyho

I'm SEOing a daily deals site that mostly runs on https Versions. (only the home page is on http). I'm wondering what to do for canonicalization. IMO it would be easiest to run all pages on https.

But the scarce resources I find are not so clear. For instance, this Youmoz blog post claims that https is only for humans, not for bots! That doesn't really apply anymore, right?

[Matthew_Edgar]

I wouldn't redirect just bots to http instead of https. That is a lot of work and honestly not worth the effort. I have worked on plenty of sites that require https across the entire site and Google crawls those with no issue.

As for your website, I wouldn't worry too much about http v. https for the canonical. However, if you can I would keep it consistent on a page level. It would be fine to say that the canonical for the about page is https://www.domain.com/about but the canonical for the home page is http://www.domain.com. I've had to do this on a number of ecomerce sites where the product pages are https but the rest of the site is http.

I hope that helps.

[zeepartner]

cool, thank for your backup on this. I figured that the bot-redirect described would be a bit over the top. And great to know that having a http-homepage on an otherwise https domain is a non-issue. much appreciated!