Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

[HB17]

Hello,

Simple question - Should we be redirecting our HTTP pages to HTTPS? If yes, why, if not, why?

Thanks!

[dynamyt100]

I assume your referring to implementing SSL? Let me give you some personal advice here. Forget about it. there was huge hype last year about Google giving reward to https domains so I immediately went ahead. In doing so I lost a ton of indexed URL's which took about 2 months to recover from. So, I would say forget about making any changes, not worth the effort.

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi Harry,

If you already did implant HTTPS on your website you should definitely start redirecting since you will otherwise have a duplicated version on your website.

But I suppose you’re still in to process of making that decision. In that case I would read this post on Moz which can give you a great overview of what HTTPS can and cannot do for your website (and your SEO).

http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

SEO wise the main point is that this is just a small rankings factor which might not be worth the time and hassle. Personally I would implant it in a new website, but wouldn’t (solely based on the SEO benefits) change an existing website to HTTPS. In that situation the security, privacy and trust reasons should be important to you as well to justify the decision.

I hope this helps!

[gbkevin]

Thanks for your opinions and experiences.  Just a question.. did you 301 redirect all your http pages to https?  If so, you still lost indexed pages?  Thanks for your help.

[alwaysriding]

Yes - for the simple reason that from January 2017, Google Chrome will start marking all sites that do not have https active on sensitive pages as insecure - this is a very important step.

As is the way with Google, this 'gentle' shepherding is surely a forewarning of a move to 'https is mandatory' before long...

https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-secure-web.html

"Eventually, we plan to label all HTTP pages as non-secure, and change the HTTP security indicator to the red triangle that we use for broken HTTPS."

So really, you have no choice, and honestly, it's not so bad. We just moved our entire site to https without any issues.