Losing backlinks between http and https

[muzzmoz]

Late last year, Shopify moved all their sites from http to https.

I did an audit of a Shopify site recently and discovered the following...

• The https version of the site has just 13 backlinks from 5 domains
• The http version of the site has 568 backlinks from 48 domains

So I went into the blog (which is on a different domain - long story) and changed all the backlinks from http to https. One week later... the https version of the site now has 278 backlinks from the same 5 domains.

I've been told that Google doesn't worry about this when it comes to rankings. Not sure if this is true or not. But I definitely believe this DOES affect MOZ Domain Authority.

Can anybody confirm or deny this? If the backlinks do not change from http to https following a migration, does this impact MOZ Domain Authority and/or Google rankings?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Was there a redirect in place to make sure all old links on your site will go from HTTP to HTTPS? If Yes, it wouldn't really matter as it will make sure that the link value + links will be attributed to the new version on HTTPS. If that wasn't the case than it will obviously have quite an impact. These days though it's a bit vague if couple does recognize that a site is also available on a HTTPS.

Martijn.

[muzzmoz]

Don't really know if redirects were in place. Only just taken over the management. But from what I can gather, Shopify moved all sites on its platform from http to https.

The URLs do all seem to redirect. But the URLs within backlinks all still point to http. If I run a report in ahrefs, the http version might still have hundreds or thousands of backlinks, but the https does not. At the same time, I have seen MOZ domain authority plummet.

I just manually updated a bunch of backlinks for one site to point to https. Now ahrefs is picking them up as backlinks in their report.