Secure Vs Non-Secure Redirects

[gkellyiii]

I have a client who has a lot of duplicate pages on their site. The pages are secure and then non secure counterparts. Not sure why they have this in place but i recomended that they redirect on to the other or vice versa using 301 redirects.

I am getting some questions as to why they should do this. Does anyone have a good document outlining the reasoning behind this? For me its just a matter of cleaning up duplicate content but wondering if there is any technical data out there.

[AlanMosley]

Well I have to ask, why are they https, if you can get to the same page using http, do they need to be secure or not?

having 2 versions will cause them to gain links to both and split the rank.

I would force https if it is needed, i would only 301 if you know that there are links pointed to the un-wanted version.