Proper method of consolidating https to http?

[seagreen]

A client has an application area of the site (a directory) that has a form and needs to be secured with ssl.  The vast majority of the site is static, and does not need to be secured.  We have experienced situations where a visitor navigates the site as https which then throws security errors.  We want to keep static visitors on http; (and crawlers) and only have visits to the secure area display as ssl.  How is this best accomplished?

Our developer wants to add a rule to the global configuration file in php that uses a 301 redirect to ensure static pages are accessed as http, and the secure directory is accessed as https.  Is the the proper protocol?  Are there any SEO considerations we should make?

Thanks.

[StreamlineMetrics]

Hi there,

I would agree with your developer in using 301 redirects to ensure all static pages resolve only to the HTTP version while the secure pages resolve only to HTTPS.

As for SEO, the search engines should follow these 301 redirects just fine, but it might also be a good idea to designate canonical URLs to tell the search engines only to index non-HTTPS pages just to be safe. The PHP code below automatically detects which version of the page is being accessed and automatically inserts a canonical tag to tell the search engines to only index the non-HTTPS versions.

$currenturl= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

//Check if it is using the secure https port which is 443
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] == “443″) {

//connected to secure port, formulate the http canonical version
$canonicalversion=”http://”.$currenturl;

//echo the canonical version to the HTML as link rel canonical tag

echo ‘’;
}
?>