HTTPS in Rel Canonical

[Studio33]

Hi,

Should I, or do I need to, use HTTPS (note the "S") in my canonical tags?

Thanks

Andrew

[Dr-Pete]

If the canonical version of your URLs is secure (HTTPS), then yes - you should use absolute paths with "https://" in the them for your canonical tags.

[AlanMosley]

Dr Pete as usual is correct here, but I would ask a further question, is your page accessed from both http and https? if so I would make the page "https required" so it is not, and use a 301 if you all ready have links to http.

I work on Microsoft IIS  servers this is very easy to do, not sure how you do it on lynix

[Studio33]

Hi

Thank you both for your responses.  Alan your point is very interesting.  The main reason for asking the question is because we are desperately trying to find a solution to why our HTTPS page is not being indexed by google 6 weeks after going live.  There are 2 other SEOMoz posts by us that have not been able to answer this "Mystery"

www.seomoz.org/q/why-isn-t-google-indexing-our-site

www.seomoz.org/q/why-is-our-page-will-not-being-found-by-google

The HTTPS page in question HTTPS://www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/invoiceTemplate is in fact references via a link at the bottom of HTTP://www.invoicestudio.com (note no "S").

Alan could you please explain your answer further as I do not fully understand what you are saying but it sounds like the HTTP link to HTTPS maybe causing the issue and would like to explore further to solve this long standing issue that is very important to us.

Thanks

Andrew.

[AlanMosley]

In Microsoft IIS server you can require uses use https on a folder basis, you seem to want to force to not use https, this can be done by writing a urlrewrite rule.

If your site does not use https at all, then just remove the binging for SSL. If you have some https pages and some without then you need to do the above.

If you are using a lynix type server then you will have to look it up, if you are using
IIS I can show you how to do this.

[Studio33]

Hi Alan,

Thanks, we are using IIS, could you please explain how to do this further please.  Do you think this maybe the cause of google not seeing and indexing HTTPS page?

Thanks

Andrew

[AlanMosley]

ok some info

Do you have any pages in your site that need https?

if so are they all in the same folder

Is your site asp.net or asp.net MVC?

do you have access to the IIS control panel?

[Studio33]

Hi

Answers below in order:

Yes

Yes folder called \Secure

asp.net

Yes

[AlanMosley]

in iis cp find the folder secure, slect ssl settings from the mail window, and tick "require https", they will now be forced to use https for that folder.

Next if you haven't already, using web platform installer, install url rewrite in IIS, best grab SEO toolkit while you are there. Restart IIS cp after install

Select the site then go to url rewrite,

click add rule

Select blank rule

fill in as per screen shots here

http://screencast.com/t/6qUxduZ7UxWz

http://screencast.com/t/cvivbdFsm

If any problems get back to me. I did this without testing.

If you installed seo toolkit also, you will see there are some ready built rules at bottom, see tutorials here if needed.http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials

Note with the rule remove append trailing slash, I always select remove as when people type out your url they never put a slash on the end.

When your done select the site again and have a play with the SEO toolkit, do a scan on your site.

let me know how you went

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, definitely agree - the how/why of using https in general is a much broader and more difficult question.

You said the first link was http (not secure), but it looks like it redirects to a secure page? I'm not seeing any crawl issues, although I wonder if the combination of a footer link and the page looking like a lead-gen page is causing Google to ignore it. Honestly, though, it feels more like a technical issue. I'm not seeing any red flags, though.

[Studio33]

Thanks Alan all done so far so good thanks for your help