Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?

[Aquatell]

My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform.  We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https.  Only our shopping cart is using https protocol.  We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version.  What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version.  And the https version is always better.  Example:  http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27.  Can somebody please help me make sense of this?  Thanks,

[solvid]

Hi,

It seems like Google might be treating http and https as 2 different websites. Have you specified the preffered website version in your Search Console?

[RobCairns]

Hi Laurie,

Absolutely - the answer is actually more simple than you might think. Google has explicitly stated that HTTPS is a ranking factor and benefits the domain more than HTTP. Check out this post on the Moz Blog by Cyrus Sheppard:

https://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2015

I will quote from the blog itself:

"While page length, hreflang use, and total number of links all show moderate association with Google rankings, we found that using HTTPS has a very low positive correlation. This could indicate it's the "tie-breaker" Google claims."

Here's a link to the actual survey data:

https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

Basically, HTTPS is a tie-breaker system set up whereby if all else remains the same, a site using HTTPS will beat out a site using HTTP in the SERPs.

This is perfectly expressed in your data.

Hope this helps to make sense of the situation and let me know if you need anything else,

Rob

[evolvingSEO]

Laurie

It should be clarified that Moz's Domain Authority, while a really solid metric, is not the metric Google has or uses. And domain authority can have a few artificial quirks. So I would not be alarmed at all.

That said - can you explain where you are seeing the two different number? I see a Page Authority of 39 for both http and https - and I see a domain authority of 27 for both http and https.

Now, even IF Moz has two different numbers for http and https, again, this is not what Google is doing, it's just an approximation.

Setting a canonical from https to http is just a band-aid and I would not recommend that approach. I would recommend having a site-wide 301 redirect so if a user lands on the https version of a URL it redirects them to the same version of that page on http. Or vice vera, whichever version you are prioritizing.

I have to respectfully disagree with Dmytro and Robert - as mentioned, Moz's metrics are not Google metrics - and the best action here is always to prioritize http or https with redirects.