Please help me stop google indexing https pages on my wordpress site

[rookie123]

I added SSL to my wordpress blog because that was the only way to get a dedicated IP address for my site at my host. Now I am noticing Google has started indexing posts both as http and https. Can some one please help how to force google not to index https as I am sure its like having duplicate content. All help is appreciated. So far I have added this to top of htaccess file: RewriteEngine on

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$

RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots_ssl.txt And added robots_ssl.txt with following: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /  User-agent: * Disallow: /

But https pages are still being indexed. Please help.

[StalkerB]

The problem here is you've not told the robots to noindex the https version, you've simply said they're not allowed to crawl it, but if they see a link go to there they know it exists in some capacity. What you need is the robots noindex tag on all these pages.

If you have some way of differentiating the https pages in your template then you just need to add

to the header.

If you can't then you can try to do it by putting this bit of php in your header

if ($_server['https] == "on") {
echo ";
}

?>

I would guess there's some dangers in that doing bad stuff to your site, so make sure and test it. If it appears on all your pages take it off immediately!

[rookie123]

Its a wordpress site and actually I do not even have a single page that needs https.

I am also thinking of just getting rid of ssl from my site. I added it to have a unique IP for my site cause I had heard it helps with SEO but I think the issues outweigh the benefits.
What do u think is better, do these code changes or just get rid of SSL?

[StalkerB]

Can you just redirect the https to the http version?

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[rookie123]

Barry,

I will try that also. Also wanted to ask you what you think about adding following to the template.

if ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] = "on") {
    echo 'content="noindex, nofollow">';
}

[StalkerB]

Did you just copy code from Digital Point or have SEOmoz started putting ads in?

The nofollow should in theory stop bots wandering around the https version once they're on there, so can't hurt.

I think you're best redirecting the https version though if you don't need it at all.

[rookie123]

Hehe. Some one on DP suggested that.

So are you saying just add this to htaccess

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sitename.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I am just trying to understand what it actually do? Also I am guessing i will have to deindex already indexed https pages from webmaster tools.

[CPU]

Hi Rookie123

Having unique IP's may be of use from an SEO perspective if you have multiple sites that you are interlinking with the hope of boosting SEO. However there is no guarantee that Google will not be able to work out that the sites are still in fact related.

If this is a single stand alone site then I would not worry about having a unique IP as I am not aware of any tangible benefit and would be more focused on resolving the duplicate content issue.

Hope this helps.