Ranking http://www when its forwarded to https://www

[EVERWORLD.ENTERTAIMENT]

Hello,

I have a question about the best practices for assigning "https" and "http" versions. We have added https://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and was ranking. However I noticed with my other tools, that http://www.mysite.com version had better anchor text distribution and also had better Trust Flow were as the https://www.mysite.com version had no trust flow at all.

Can I assign http://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and still have it do a 301 Redirect to https://www.mysite.com. This way I can capitalize on the better anchor text profile and trust flow, and still rank properly?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

If you 301 to https://www.mysite.com/, the authority of **http://**www.mysite.com/ will be largely attributed to the HTTPS version. That is, all the links (anchor text, etc.) pointing to the non-HTTPS version will help the HTTPS version rank well. There may be some dilution along the way, but you will not lose the benefit of those links simply because the HTTPS version is canonical and a 301 is in place.

You can feel free to specify the https version in WMT as a result. In fact, there have been murmurings that several Google employees favour HTTPS sites, but we are a long way from that being a recommendation. It's just now much more safe to say that using HTTPS is safe (it used to present some ranking / crawling issues). http://searchengineland.com/ranking-benefit-making-site-ssl-yet-googles-cutts-like-make-happen-186810

[EVERWORLD.ENTERTAIMENT]

Thanks for your Answer Jane!