Http v https Duplicate Issues

[niallfred]

Hello,

I noticed earlier an issue on my site.

http://mysite.com and https://mysite.com both had canonical links pointing to themselves so in effect creating duplicate content.

I have now taken steps to ensure the https version has a canonical that points to the http version but I was wondering what other steps would people recommend? Is it safe to NOINDEX the https pages? Or block them via robots.txt or both?

We are not quite ready to go fully HTTPS with our site yet (I know Google now prefers this)

Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

If your site is not ready to go fully https, I would hold off on it until you are, unless you have a checkout process or information gathering portion of the site that should be https.

Reason being - the https isn't providing any ranking factor value as it's being canonicalized to the http version of your site, so you're not getting the value.

When you are ready to go https, I recommend taking a look at this Moz resource, specifically the section under SEO checklist to preserve your rankings.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[DSM_UK]

Hi,

I agree with Patrick, if you are not using the https then the safest way to ensure no canonical content is to remove it all together.

If you are using it partially such as checkouts and user areas, then you could 301 redirect the https traffic for the other pages to their https counterparts until you are ready to go full https.

Kind Regards

[niallfred]

Thanks for your replies. Although I'm still confused.

I have areas of the site that are and should be https (checkout etc) and these pages have canonical links pointing to the https version.

The rest of my site however is still on http but the https versions can be accessed via their urls. What I have done today is to add a canonical tag to the https pages to point to the http pages. Is this the correct thing to do to avoid a duplicate content issue?

[AxialDev]

Since HTTPS is now a ranking signal, it is better to use the HTTPS version as the canonical. I would personally make every page of the site HTTPS via 301 redirections (or rel=canonical but those can be trickier to implement).

http://site.com --301--> https://site.com
http://site.com/page1/ --301--> https://site.com/page1/
etc.

This may require a few changes to the site (internal links shouldn't have unnecessary redirections, adding the HTTPS site to Search Consol (webmaster tools), etc.) so make sure you look around for resources on migration.

If you decide to keep HTTP only, do not noindex or disallow HTTPS because you may have valuable links pointing to HTTPS which help your ranking.