Http vs https: which is better for seo / usability

[Renford_Nelson]

Hi All,

Firstly thank you for taking the time to look. My dilemma is as follows;

I have a site on wordpress that I have added an ssl certificate to and the entire domain is secure.

The site has a mix of content including a blog area and product pages.

My question is what does Google prefer, http or https or does it not matter

As i see it my option is to keep  the entire site as https and enforce this sitewide so all non secure content redirects to the https version or i could enforce https just in the cart and or product pages, all other content, homepage, blog, about us, contact us etc would be http.

From an seo perspective ie google search engine,  is their a best way to proceed?

Finally, as i currently have http and https both displaying ie duplicate, what would be the way to fix this, i have yoast plugin so can set the canonical there and can also edit my robot.txt.

I have come across this resource (http://www.creare.co.uk/http-vs-https-duplicate-content) and am wondering if this guideline is still correct or is there another more current way, if so I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction.

thanks in advance.

[kwoolf]

Hi tahirekhanvc,

I'm a big fan of Matt Cutts, and you should be, too. Check out what he has to say about duplicate content: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319706/Googles-Matt-Cutts-A-Little-Duplicate-Content-Wont-Hurt-Your-Rankings

I had a similar issue with a client a year or so ago. As I'm sure you know, secure pages are encrypted and need to be decrypted, which takes more time and requires more resources. And with that, speed may become an issue, and speed is a ranking factor.

A good rule of thumb is to secure pages that communicate private data, i.e. contact pages, carts, etc. If you are offering some sort of security service, or if your business model requires earning a great deal of trust from your visitors, then go secure the site. Now I'm talking about sites like https://squareup.com/ (FYI, I actually do not recommend that service but you can see the home page is secure). And that company actually takes it one step further with an EV SSL, where you can show your company name in the green bar. Go for a purpose, but not SEO in particular.

Matt went over this about the time Facebook switched to https. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801641 Now it's up to you to make the call, but make it and stick with it. What you don't want to do is go back and forth a couple times trying to rank better thinking that this is a major problem.