Moving from http to https: image duplicate issue?

[fablau]

Hello everyone,

We have recently moved our entire website virtualsheetmusic.com from http:// to https:// and now we are facing a question about images.

Here is the deal: All webpages URLs are properly redirected to their corresponding https if they are called from former http links. Whereas, due to compatibility issues, all images URLs can be called either via http or https, so that any of the following URLs work without any redirect:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png

https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png

Please note though that all internal links are relative and not absolute.

So, my question is: Can that be a problem from the SEO stand point? In particular: We have thousands of images indexed on Google, mostly images related to our digital sheet music preview image files, and many of them are ranking pretty well in the image pack search results. Could this change be detrimental in some way? Or doesn't make any difference in the eyes of Google? As I wrote above, all internal links are relative, so an image tag like this one:

Hasn't changed at all, it is just loaded in a https context.

I'll wait for your thoughts on this. Thank you in advance!

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

As far as I understand, there is no such thing as duplicate content just for images. Duplicate content is more for the page as a whole. Especially, since you guys redirected all the links, you shouldn't have any problems, since google will simply "realize" the change.

Now, it's better to make sure that images (and all the other resources) available only through one protocol - http or https.

Hope this helps

[fablau]

Thank you Dimitrii for your reply.

Well, your two statements above contradicts each other, in my opinion. You see, what really concerns me is your last suggestion:

"it's better to make sure that images (and all the other resources) available only through one protocol - http or https."

And hence my original concern. Why should we make sure that images are available only through one protocol if you say first that there isn't such thing as duplicate content for images? Why should we concern about that then?

Sorry for my further request for clarification. I really appreciated your help!

[DmitriiK]

So, the reason I recommend having images loading only through one resource is the "insecurity" of https connection, if any resources are loaded not over https. You might have seen that sometimes instead of green lock in a browser bar, it can show yellow exclamation mark - that's one of the reasons. And also it's just cleaner, if everything is loaded the same way.

Here is a link to resource about mixed content: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/prevent-mixed-content/fixing-mixed-content

[DmitriiK]

I did quick search, and there are lots of good articles about why images are not duplicate content: http://bfy.tw/9Qy4

[fablau]

Thank you Dimitrii to clarifying, actually all our webpages now load images only via the https://, but since many external websites are hard-linking to many of our images via the regular http:// protocol, I was thinking to allow linking to them the "insecure" way if requested. Do you see my point? So... to better clarify my initial question, let's say Google is spidering one of those external affiliates and finds an image tag like this:

Will Google consider the image found at:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/image.jpg

a duplicate of:

https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/image.jpg

?? This was my original question...

In any case, I have made some testings today, and I have been able to redirect all images via .htaccess permanently (301) to https:// and looks like even if an image is requested with the http:// from the browser, it shows up correctly because the web browser handles redirects for images in the same way it handles them for the web page itself.

So... my concern should be solved this way. But in case, for any reason, I need to be able to serve the same image from both protocols (http or https) it is my understand that that shouldn't be an issue anyway. Is my assumption correct?

Thanks again.

[DmitriiK]

Oh, I see. Yeah, there shouldn't be any problems, if someone else links to your images with http. And yes, your assumption is correct

[fablau]

Great! Glad to know that. Thank you Dimitrii, I appreciated your help very much!

[DmitriiK]

No problem